BLANKNEY JOURNAL

Final Day - Bumper Issue

2010-04-14T00:15:00.008+01:00

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AS TODAY IS THE FINAL PUBLICATION

OF THE BLANKNEY JOURNAL WE HAVE

A BUMPER ISSUE OF NO LESS THAN (15)

POSTS. AS THERE ARE ONLY FIVE POSTS
TO A PAGE, DON'T FORGET TO GO BACK

A PAGE TO SEE MORE POSTS!

******

CHEERS!

Looking Back - USSR Pledges To Leave Afghanistan

2010-04-14T00:14:00.008+01:00

On this day in 1988, the Soviet Union signed an agreement pledging to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.
The pact, drawn up in negotiations between the United States, the USSR, Pakistan and Afghanistan, was signed in a United Nations ceremony in the Swiss capital, Geneva.
It ended nine years of occupation by the Soviet Union, who intervened in 1979 to prop up the struggling communist government.
The subsequent confrontation has drawn in the United States and Afghanistan's neighbours.
Delicate negotiations
Today's agreement provides for a gradual Russian withdrawal, phased over nine months.
But critics have pointed out that it still allows the Soviet Union and the United States to continue arming the two sides in the Afghan civil war.
Today's signing ceremony was itself fraught with complications and required some delicate negotiations to get all four parties around the table.
The Pakistan and Afghanistan groups have so far never met face to face.
One UN official commented, "Getting them to agree where to sit is almost as difficult as getting the agreement in the first place."
Elaborate schedule
In the end, an elaborate and precise 21-minute schedule was drawn up.
The UN Secretary-General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, came in first, followed by the Afghan and Pakistani foreign ministers who entered the room simultaneously from separate doors.
They sat either side of Mr Perez de Cuellar.
There was then a similar arrangement for the US Secretary of State and his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze.
Threat of anarchy
Resistance leaders are furious that they were excluded from the Geneva talks.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, chairman of the seven-party mujahideen alliance, attacked the accord as defective, unpracticable and ineffective.
He dismissed the entire UN-sponsored peace process as a waste of time, saying the agreement would ensure that what he called "an illegitimate puppet regime" would remain in place in Kabul. Critics believe Afghanistan will slip into anarchy after the Russians leave, as war continues between the Soviet-backed Communist government of President Sayid Mohammed Najibullah and the seven mujahideen rebel groups.
But UN mediator Diego Cordovez was confident the pact would hold, and rejected fears that a bloodbath would follow the departure of the Soviet army.
"Things will start changing now," he said. "There will be a fundamental change of attitude among all the people."

The last Soviet troops left Afghanistan in February 1989.
As predicted, a long period of civil war followed.
The mujahideen overthrew President Najibullah in 1992. Rival mujahideen factions then spent the next four years vying for control, until the Pashtun-dominated Taleban seized control of Kabul in 1996.
They instituted a hardline version of Islam, banning women from work and introducing punishments such as amputation and stoning.
Following the September 11 attacks in America in 2001, the Taleban refused to hand over the man believed to be responsible, Osama bin Laden.
Their stand meant Afghanistan became the first battleground in the so-called war against terror.
The US and Britain launched airstrikes against Afghanistan later that year, and the Taleban was driven from power within months.
An interim government under Hamid Karzai was sworn in in December 2001.
In presidential elections in 2004, he was elected president with 55% of the vote.
He leads a country whose economy and infrastructure are in ruins.
Many parts of the country are still controlled by regional warlords and their private militias, while attacks by Taleban remnants and militant groups continue.

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall Who's The Fairest Of Them All

2010-04-14T00:13:00.004+01:00

(Click on image to enlarge)

Why Do We Say That?

2010-04-14T00:12:00.001+01:00

BITTER END
Anchor cable was wrapped around posts called bitts. The last piece of cable was called the bitter end. If you let out the cable to the bitter end there was nothing else you could do, you had reached the end of your resources.

THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND
In Matthew 15:14 Jesus criticised the Pharisees, the religious authorities of his day, 'they be blind leaders of the blind'.

ON YOUR BEAM ENDS
On a ship the beams are horizontal timbers that stretch across the ship and support the decks. If you are on your beam-ends your ship is leaning at a dangerous angle. In other words you are in a precarious situation.

BEE LINE
In the past people believed that bees flew in a straight line to their hive. So if you made a bee line for something you went straight for it.

TO BOOT
If you get something to boot it means you get it extra. However it has nothing to do with boots you wear on your feet. It is a corruption of the old word bot, which means profit or advantage.

COCK A HOOP
This phrase comes from a primitive tap called a spile and shive. A shive was a wooden tube at the bottom of a barrel and a spile was a wooden bung. You removed the shive to let liquid flow out and replaced it to stop the flow. The spile was sometimes called a cock. If people were extremely happy and wanted to celebrate they took out the cock and put it on the hoop on the top of the barrel to let the drink flow out freely. So it was cock a hoop. So cock a hoop came to mean ecstatic.

Excuses

2010-04-14T00:11:00.001+01:00

Blonde Jokes

2010-04-14T00:10:00.004+01:00

Timex and Rolex.
A blonde named her two dogs Timex and Rolex. A friend asked why she named them that. "Well, duh," she replied, "because they're watchdogs, of course."

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Selling a Car

A blonde was trying to sell her old car but wasn't having any luck because the car had 250,000 miles on it. One day, she mentioned this to a friend. Her friend told her, "There is a way to make the car easier to sell, but it's not legal." "That doesn't matter," replied the blonde, "I've just gotta sell it." "Okay," said the friend. "Here is the address of a friend of mine. He owns a car repair shop. Tell him I sent you and he will turn the odometer in your car back to 50,000 miles. Then it should not be a problem to sell it." The following weekend, the blonde made the trip to the mechanic. About one month after that, her friend asked her, "Well, did you sell your car?" "No," replied the blonde, "why should I? It only has 50,000 miles on it!"

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Which is Further Away?

Two blondes were sitting on a bench on the Atlantic City boardwalk admiring a beautiful, bright full moon. One said to the other, "I wonder which is further away, Florida or the moon?" "Duh..." said the other, "Can you see Florida from here?"

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Mail Check

A man was in his front yard mowing grass when his pretty blonde neighbor came out of the house and went straight to the mailbox. She opened it then slammed it shut and stormed back into the house. A little later she came out of her house again, went to the mailbox, again opened it, and again slammed it shut. Angrily, back into the house she went. As the man was getting ready to edge the lawn, here she came out again, marched to the mail box, opened it and then slammed it shut harder than ever. Puzzled by her actions the man asked her, "Is something wrong?" To which she replied, "There certainly is! My stupid computer keeps saying, 'YOU'VE GOT MAIL'."

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Cheating Boyfriend

A blonde suspects her boyfriend of cheating on her, so she goes about and buys a gun. She goes to his apartment unexpectedly and when she opens the door, she finds him in the arms of a redhead. Well, the blonde is really angry. She opens her purse to take out the gun, and as she does so, she is overcome with grief. She takes the gun and puts it to her head. The boyfriend yells, "No, honey, don't do it." The blonde replies, "Shut up, you're next!"

Boobs

2010-04-14T00:09:00.001+01:00

WW2 Peoples War - My Aunty Mary's Wartime Memoirs

2010-04-14T00:08:00.001+01:00

THE SECOND WORLD WAR
By Mary Lawrence
I was 17 when the Second World War started and lived at Peckham Rye with my parents — I was also engaged to be married to Fred, my fiancé. It didn’t come entirely as a shock when Neville Chamberlain (the then Prime Minister) announced on the wireless (there was no TV then) that we were at war with Germany. There had been unrest between us and Germany for the past year and Chamberlain had come home from a meeting with Hitler waving a piece of paper with Hitler’s signature on it, saying it would be ‘peace in our time’.
I had the same feelings and emotions as everybody: I liked going out, enjoying myself — going to the pictures, going dancing, having a crafty fag, talking about boys, falling in love - all the things you do at that age. But from that Sunday, my life was going to change drastically. Fred (as I shall refer to him from now on) and I had made arrangements to visit my sister on that Sunday morning. Fred had an old 1929 Austin Seven, so after Chamberlain’s speech, we set off. About half way there — half an hour after war had been declared — we heard the awful wail of the air-raid warning siren. We were stunned and frightened, imagining all sorts of things. People were running about, not knowing what to do. Policemen were blowing whistles and telling us to get to the nearest air-raid shelter or take cover.
Being young and foolish, we decided to carry on. We arrived at my sister’s place to find her and her husband with gas-masks on and gloves handy in case poisonous gas was dropped. We didn’t have our gas-masks with us — everybody was issued with one and you were supposed to take them everywhere with you. Babies went into a sort of box, which could be carried around, to keep them protected. After about an hour, the ‘all clear’ sounded, nothing had happened — it was a false alarm. Little did we know, that siren going was to become a very familiar sound.
After that, began a period which was called ‘the phoney war’, at least as far as we were concerned. On August 11th 1940, Fred and I were married. The vicar who married us was a very nice young man, putting meaning into the service, and he gave us a talk about ‘give and take’ in marriage and not letting the sun go down on a row or argument without making up. Some time later, he was in the scouts hut with two other men when it received a direct hit in a bombing raid and all three of them were killed.
A week after our wedding day, the daylight bombing raids began, with the target being Croydon Airport. After a while, the Germans had lost so many planes that they switched to night-time bombing. One day, I’ll never forget — it was a Saturday morning — my mum and I were in our back garden and we heard the sound of a plane and knew it was a Jerry. There was no air-raid warning — this plane had got in under the barrage balloons. It was so low and as it swooped over our heads, we saw the pilot in his leather helmet and goggles and a black cross on the side of the plane. He seemed to be looking straight at us; he went on to Lewisham, where he dropped a bomb on Woolworth’s, killing about 200 people — most of them women and children. It was devastating — I never knew how he managed to get to London without being detected.
The barrage balloons were a grey, fat, sausage shape with fins and they were secured to the ground by a cable, which men turned to bring them lower or make them higher. A lot were up all the time, but in an air-raid a lot more would go up; the purpose of them was to keep the Jerry planes up high so they couldn’t pick out their targets so easily and they also kept them in range of our anti-aircraft guns.
When the bombing began in earnest, everyone had the option of having an air-raid shelter: an Anderson for outdoors or a Morrison for indoors. The Anderson was the safest and my dad made a very safe shelter at the bottom of our garden. It was nearly all underground, with a load of earth on top and a huge blackberry bush covering it all. We had a mattress down there, some spare food and drink and some candles. It was to become my sleeping place for a long time — and also my baby’s, when he arrived. He never went to bed in his cot upstairs, I’d put him straight down in the shelter when it was his bedtime — even if the siren hadn’t gone, as I knew it would later. It saved waking him up and rushing to the shelter when the warning did go. At the front of our house was a railway line and during the war, there was a mobile gun on it during an air raid, firing at the planes. The noise was horrendous: as well as the sound of the bombs screaming down and the explosions, there was this huge gun letting rip.
In the Blitz, indeed during the whole war, we had a blackout — no lights must be showing anywhere; people had to hang black curtains up at their windows. Even if only a chink of light was showing, an air-raid warden would be knocking at the door telling you a light was showing. Cars could not have any lights, no torches could be used — total blackness, so that the Jerries wouldn’t know where they were.
At night, I would often go out of the air-raid shelter for a breath of air and the Jerries would drop flares to try and see where they were. The area would be lit by a bright glow as the flare floated down — it was quite eerie.
My sister had a close shave one night: the house next door had a direct hit — she had stayed indoors that night, wanting to sleep in a proper bed for a change. A big walnut wardrobe in her bedroom crashed down on her baby’s cot, trapping him. In a way, it saved him from falling debris; the wardens got the baby out and he was unharmed, except for being covered in dust — as she was also. Her house was uninhabitable for a time, so she went to the country for the rest of the war.
At one period of the Blitz, the sirens went at 6 o’clock every evening and the all-clear at 6 o’clock very morning. This went on for weeks and weeks without a break. Most people slept underground every night: the bombs dropped incessantly, but Hitler couldn’t get us down. Coventry was bombed, for the factories making tanks etc, Plymouth, Swansea and Southampton because of the docks, to name but a few places. They all took a terrible battering, killing hundreds and destroying most of the cities, but the civilians carried on. A special bond sprang up between us Londoners — everybody tried to help each other, people were friendly to strangers, they looked out for each other, it’s a shame it didn’t stay like that after the war ended.
After a bad night of bombing, the streets would be littered with shrapnel, which came from the shells our soldiers were firing at the planes. I collected many pieces — some quite large. Once, I picked a bit of dog mess, mistaking it for shrapnel — I soon dropped it, as you can imagine!
The City of London was set alight by incendiary bombs one night. It was the biggest fire I have ever seen, the sky was a brilliant red, the docks getting it very badly. Although the incendiary bombs weren’t as explosive as the ordinary bombs, the damage they did by fire was immense.
During the very bad night-time bombing, we slept under a shop my father-in-law had at Victoria. He had made a room under the pavement — it was a store-room really. We slept there for months. Once, we were going to Streatham, where my father-in-law lived, for a bath and to wash our hair, when we were caught in an air-raid and had to take shelter on Clapham common. It was crowded with people — all singing — and we joined in. Close by was an anti-aircraft gun, firing away at the Jerries overhead. We were trying to drown out the noise that was going on outside.
As the crow flies, Peckham isn’t far from Kent, over which the Jerries used to come on their way to bomb London and it was very usual to see a dog-fight going on between our Spitfires and their fighters, wheeling about and firing their guns at each other — the Spitfires had 8 machine guns. There were losses on both sides, but the Spitfires saved London from a lot worse bombing — as Mr Churchill said: “never was so much owed, by so many, to so few “.
The bombing had to be seen to be believed. Fred was on a course at Walthamstow, he used to cycle back and forth, from there to Peckham. His route took him through the Elephant and Castle district and he did this for a while. He got home as usual one evening and that night there was a very bad air-raid. The next morning he went on his usual journey to Walthamstow, but when he got to the Elephant and Castle, he just couldn’t recognise a thing — it had been completely flattened. It was chaos — hose-pipes everywhere, firemen putting out fires, people being dug out of bombed buildings. He didn’t know which way to go — that gives you some idea of what London looked like in the Blitz.
My own experience of being blown down a shelter by a bomb, causing me to lose my first baby was harrowing enough, but not compared to what a lot of Londoners had to suffer — death of their loved ones and some were maimed for life.
Because the Germans lost so many planes, instead of bombing us, they began their onslaught with ‘doodle-bugs’. These were unmanned jets — a flying bomb; the distance they covered was governed by the amount of fuel they held. We had no warning of these unheard of things, so we were unable to take shelter. They were long, with flames coming out of the back, when the engine stopped, they dropped like a stone, doing untold damage and causing lots more loss of life. How much more could us civilians cope with?
This went on for months, meanwhile the Germans were inventing something even more evil — the V-2 rocket — to try and bring England to its knees. I stood the bombs and the doodle-bugs, but these latest unmanned missiles really got me down. They were long, like telegraph-poles and were launched in Belgium or Holland, they went straight up in the air, out of range of our fighter planes, into the upper atmosphere, so we had no warning they were coming. They dropped straight down and the first we knew was when they exploded. They did more damage than any bombs or doodle-bugs, as people couldn’t take shelter; thousands were killed in their beds; they came day or night, killing 200 to 300 people at a time. My nerves went to pieces at that time: worrying for my baby, my family, about being buried under piles of debris. Luckily, these terrifying things didn’t go on for long, as the launching sites got over-run by the British army and the war was nearing its end.
So, after nearly 5 years of bombing we could begin to think of living a normal life again. As I said, I was 17 when it started and 23 when it ended, so I lost six years of my youth. Like millions of others, I was lucky to come out alive — with my baby. I didn’t lose anyone close to me, but to live through the Blitz is something I won’t forget till my dying day.

Acknowledgements:
Alan Constable
Peoples War

Jealousy Is A Terrible Thing

2010-04-14T00:07:00.001+01:00

Cheeky!

Housing Complaints

2010-04-14T00:06:00.008+01:00

Will you please send a man to look at my water? It is a funny colour and not fit to drink.

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I wish to complain that my father hurt his ankle very badly when he put his foot in the hole in his back passage.

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Our kitchen floor is damp. We have two small children and would like a third so please send someone round to do something about it.

The Journal Family

2010-04-14T00:05:00.004+01:00

Left to Right: Son David, Your's Truly, Grandson Alexander,

Wife Angela and Daughter Karen

The Final News Headlines

2010-04-14T00:04:00.004+01:00

Chef throws his heart into helping feed needy.

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Death causes loneliness, feeling of isolation.

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Plane too close to ground, crash probe told.

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Plot to kill officer had vicious side.

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Arson suspect held in Massachusetts fire.

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Blind woman gets new kidney from dad she hasn't seen in years.

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Low wages said to be key to poverty.

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Squad helps dog bite victim.

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Something went wrong in jet crash, expert says.

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Dealers will hear car talk at noon.

Well Now You Know

2010-04-14T00:03:00.001+01:00

You can't say the Journal wasn't educational!

Homer Simpson Wisdom

2010-04-14T00:02:00.004+01:00

Go ahead play the blues if it makes you happy.

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I'm a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are.

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With $10,000, we'd be millionaires! We could buy all kinds of useful things like ..... love!

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All right, let's not panic. I'll make the money by selling one of my livers. I can get by with one.

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Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.

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When I held that gun in my hand, I felt a surge of power - like God must feel when he's holding a gun.

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We're going to get a new TV. Twenty-one inch screen, realistic flesh tones, and a little cart so we can wheel it into the dining room on holidays!

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First you don't want me to get the pony, then you want me to take it back. Make up your mind.

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I'm normally not a praying man, but if your up there, please save me, Superman!

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Marge I swear, I never thought that you would find out.

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Oh, they have internet on computers now.

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Books are useless. I only ever read one book, "To Kill A Mockingbird" - and it gave me absolutely no insight on how to kill mockingbirds! Sure it taught me not to judge a man by the color of his skin , but what good does THAT do me?

Final Racing Tip

2010-04-14T00:01:00.001+01:00

KEEP YOUR MONEY IN YOUR POCKET!

If you can't do that, you may like a flutter on today's final best bet selection. During 2009 we advised 14 bets which resulted in a Loss of 3.65 points. Today we need at least a 4/1 winner to move us into profit.

For our final racing tip we are going to today's Cheltenham meeting and the Stanjames.com Handicap Hurdle (3.20), run over 2m.4f.110y. The horse in question is Good Old Thyme a six-year-old gelding trained by Dr R D P Newland and ridden by claiming apprentice G Hawkins. The horse won over today's distance at Catterick last month and on that run looks well handicapped here. He then went to the Cheltenham Festival a week later, finishing 14 of 28 in the Grade 3 Coral Cup, running well until blundering four fences from home. He ran again at Haydock eleven days ago, finishing a respectable fourth, just over 7 lengths behind Majaales, over a trip too short and on very heavy ground. With today's ground and trip more to his liking we expect him to run a big race off a weight of 11-2 and the jockeys 5lb allowance will be an added bonus.

Wednesday 14 April 2010

Cheltenham 3.20

GOOD OLD THYME

Good luck with the above selection!

Blog Closure

2010-04-13T00:05:00.001+01:00

ANNOUNCEMENT OF BLOG CLOSURE
-------------
The last edition of the Blankney Journal
will appear on Wednesday 14th April 2010.
I would like to thank all readers of the blog
for their support. With a special thanks to
those people who became followers and
everyone who contributed material to the
Blankney Journal content.
I do hope readers found the blog both
interesting and amusing and enjoyed
reading it as much as I enjoyed compiling it.
Many thanks. Rodney Garlant

-------------

Excuses

2010-04-13T00:04:00.001+01:00

Bals des Victimes

2010-04-13T00:03:00.001+01:00

The Bals des victimes, or victims' balls, were balls that were said to have been put on by dancing societies after the Reign of Terror. To be admitted to these societies and balls, one had to be a near relative of someone who had been guillotined during the Terror. The balls came to prominence after the death of Robespierre, supposedly first being held in early 1795 and first mentioned in popular writing in 1797. While anecdotal evidence attests to the balls' occurrence, and generations of French and non-French historians described them and accepted them as fact, some recent scholarship, citing a near-total lack of primary evidence, argues that they may have been fabrications based on rumor. Historian David Bell concludes: "The bals des victimes... never took place — they were an invention of early nineteenth-century Romantic authors."
The bals des victimes allegedly began as part of a rash of merrymaking and balls that broke out as the Terror came to an end. According to one source, they emerged as an idea of youths whose parents and other near relatives had gone to the guillotine, and to whom the revolution had now restored their relatives' confiscated property. Reveling in the return of fortune they established aristocratic, decadent balls open to themselves alone.
Descriptions of the balls' particulars vary, but the common thread is that they were a cathartic device in which the participants acted out the emotional impact of their relatives' executions and the social upheavals occurring as a result of the revolution. Many who described the balls, often generations afterwards, nevertheless found them a scandalous idea. Whether real or imagined, the very idea of the balls reflected the post-Terror generations' morbid fascination with the horror of the guillotine and the excesses of the French Revolution with its mass executions.
Those who attended the orgiastic balls reportedly wore mourning clothes or elaborate costumes with crepe armbands signifying mourning. Some accounts have both men and women wearing plain but scanty dress in the wake of the impoverishment of the Revolution, at least until the return of their fortunes at which time ball dress because highly elaborate. Others describe women dressing scandalously in Greco-Roman attire, with their feet bare or adorned only by ribbons. The style of dress at such a ball was known by some as the "costume à la victime." Women, and by some accounts men too, wore a red ribbon or string around their necks at the point of a guillotine blade's impact. Both men and women attending the balls were said to have worn or cut their hair in a fashion that bared their necks in a manner reflecting the haircut given the victim by the executioner, women often using a comb known as a cadenette to achieve this fashion. According to some, this was the origin of the feminine hairstyle known as the "coiffure à la victime" or more popularly the "coiffure à la Titus". Some sources state that a woman sporting this hairstyle sometimes wore a red shawl or throat ribbon even when not attending a bal des victimes.
In another macabre touch, instead of a graceful bow or bob of the head to one's dancing partner, a man who attended a bal des victimes would jerk his head sharply downwards in imitation of the moment of decapitation. Some sources suggest that women, too, adopted this salutation.

Before And After Marriage

2010-04-13T00:02:00.001+01:00

Brainteaser - Monday's Answer

2010-04-13T00:01:00.001+01:00

Yesterday's brainteaser was in the form of a riddle. Personally, I found it difficult! How did you get on? The answer was as follows:

The words in capital letters were anagrams of the four directions WEST, EAST, SOUTH and NORTH.

Well, there you are, looks simple now doesn't it!

Blog Closure

2010-04-12T00:05:00.013+01:00

ANNOUNCEMENT OF BLOG CLOSURE

-------------

The last edition of the Blankney Journal

will appear on Wednesday 14th April 2010.

I would like to thank all readers of the blog

for their support. With a special thanks to

those people who became followers and

everyone who contributed material to the

Blankney Journal content.

I do hope readers found the blog both

interesting and amusing and enjoyed

reading it as much as I enjoyed compiling it.

Many thanks. Rodney Garlant

-------------

WW2 Peoples War - Family Life In 1942

2010-04-12T00:04:00.001+01:00

November 1942 : Walsall, West Midlands, United Kingdom

My Mother had just returned from queuing at the local greengrocer for at least an hour and a half (not that she knew what she was queuing for). Rumour had it they had some oranges but as usual, by the time she made it to the head of the queue, they had run out anyway. All was not lost, as while they waited the ladies would have a great time with a good old chat about the state of the war, whose sons and whose daughters had gone missing, who has received the dreaded telegram and how many Yanks the ‘floozy’ down the road had been entertaining that week! We used to stand outside her gate and meet the American Soldiers with, “Got any gum, chum?” They would always find something, either chocolate or chewing gum. They always looked like film stars to me, good-looking and very smart — no wonder our girls fell for them. Every Saturday night they would visit the Town Hall for dancing to Joe Loss and his band, singing to Ann Shelton, jitter-bugging and turning the place alive! Rumours were ripe and most were very scary, the latest being that German Paratroopers had landed in Kent and would be in The Midlands by the weekend! On the way back from the greengrocer’s, my Mother would have called in at the butcher’s for a large bone. Stripped of its meat, she would then go on to boil it for several hours with vegetables and pearl barley for our evening meal — a sort of meat-flavoured soup. Ration books and identity cards were necessary for living, so everyone just got on with it. In fact, there is no reason why we should not be issued with identity cards today as we all have a national insurance number - what’s the difference?
We would sit around the dinner table with my Dad, when he returned from work around 6.30p.m. After our evening meal we would all listen to the radio, and the programme would be interrupted by special messages for the Secret Agents abroad, things like, “The doves have settled in for the night”, and the very ominous Lord Haw-Haw, which began with “BER BER BER BUM”, (thumping music), “Germany calling, Germany calling.” This was meant to scare, and it did! We listened in complete silence, and he would tell of the glorious wins. You could see the depression in both Mom’s and Dad’s faces.
Dad was a leather-strainer during the day and a fire fighter at night with the National Fire Service, based at the local Arboretum, in the Grange Playhouse. Very often, he would be on duty all night, standing in for the local Fire Brigade who had been sent to help out in the Birmingham Blitz. My Aunt Winnie was bombed out of house and home in ‘Brum’ several times, but thanks to the Salvation Army Volunteers, who were absolutely fantastic people, she managed to pick herself up and start again. None of us had a great deal so it was easier to start again in those days.
It was Dad’s night off and we listened to the radio shows like ‘Tommy Handley’ with ‘I.T.M.A.’ (It’s That Man Again), or ‘Wilfred Pickles’, ‘Name That Tune’ with Violet Carson at the piano, who, after the War, went on to be the famous Ena Sharples in ‘Coronation Street’. Then the accumulator would run out of electricity, so that would be that. By nine o’clock we would go to bed (and what an ordeal that was!). By this time the living-room would be lovely and warm, so we undressed downstairs, got into our nightclothes and made a mad dash for upstairs which would be freezing cold. My Brother and I slept together for warmth, with old blankets and an old Army greatcoat. Mom would put a house-brick in the oven for a couple of hours, wrap it up in an old towel and place it in the sheets at the bottom of the bed — it worked a treat, and was great for warming your cold feet. Going to bed was a challenge, but waking up the next day was horrendous, and with only your face and nose above the blankets they would feel like icicles! We would often sit up in bed and write our names through the frost on the window, (inside, not out). My wife, Joan, now reminds me that it used to form some wonderful patterns on the window like crystals. Joan’s family had the same cold problems as thousands of others. With our toilet being downstairs you dreaded having to go in the night, but inevitably you would, and you would have to use the ‘Gerry’ or the ‘Guz-under’ (the pot), and it was awful. I remember Mom ‘slopping out’ every morning for years, and yet now it’s considered inhuman for our criminals to ‘slop out’ in prison!
The dreaded fear of an Air Raid was all too often realised when the awful screaming of the siren began to howl over the rooftops. Mom and Dad would grab us in our blankets to take us down to the Anderson Shelter at the bottom of the garden. It was pitch dark, and inside, the musty smell of damp earth greeted you at the door. We would all sit on the teak-made bunk beds supplied with the shelter. We had no lights for we had Air Raid Wardens going around bellowing to people who had candles down the shelter with them, “Get that bloody light out!”
This particular night was a beautifully clear and the stars shone like jewels in the sky, complemented by a full moon. As children, we could feel the fear and tension our parents were suffering. Mom said, “I hope this raid isn’t the German Paratroopers.” Dad replied, “You women and your rumours”. After an hour or so, which seemed like an eternity, we heard the unmistakeable step of Army boots coming nearer. Our garden path consisted of a gravel base, and as the steps got nearer, they changed to a gravel crunching sound. Mom, who by now was scared to death, said “Bill, I think it’s them!” At that point, my Dad who kept the garden tools in the shelter, picked up the garden fork, leapt out of the shelter, held the fork in front of him, and in a menacing manner he shouted “Who is it? Speak or you will get four holes all at once.” With a few expletives, a man dressed in an Army overcoat with huge boots and a haversack at his side shouted at the top of his voice, “Hey Bill, it’s only me”. Uncle Jack had been on the night shift at the local Copper Works, and had just popped home during his break to collect his ‘snap’ and a bottle of tea in an old milk bottle (the poor man’s flask). He had just popped in to see if we were all safe. My Dad collapsed with relief on the turf outside the shelter, and Mom was physically sick! I have got to say, had the garden fork have been a gun, poor Jack may now be dead!
In the distance, we could hear the familiar drone of German aircraft. They had a peculiar sound, as if ‘off and on’. We knew they were coming again, louder and louder as they drew nearer, and then all hell was let loose as an aircraft came into view. There was a huge searchlight. It was sited on Bailey’s farm two streets away. Us kids had watched all day as the Royal Artillery set up the light with the massive guns alongside. When the light caught a plane in its beam, the guns opened up, the ground shook beneath us, the noise was deafening. Birmingham was nine miles away, even less as the crow flies and by this time, the leading aircraft was pounding the city. You could hear sounds like huge thumps, not explosions, just heavy thumps, with a glow in the sky liken to a roaring bonfire on a vast scale. The prime target was Witton, particularly the I.C.I. Factory. Hundreds of men and women from this area travelled there every night for the evening and twilight shifts, making bullets and bombs. It took them about half an hour’s journey by Midland Red buses (or as we called them, “buzzes”). The courage of these people in this factory was unbelievable, with very few taking time off work for sickness or family problems.
I remember a particularly nasty medicine called ‘Fenning’s Fever Cure’. It looked like gin, and was diabolical. Another nasty remedy was a bread poultice. This consisted of a slice of bread wrapped in Comfrey Leaves (a wild plant found easily in the hedgerows) put in a linen cloth and held over a steaming pot until the bread was soppy and boiling hot. As you lay in bed feeling sorry for yourself, probably with a chest infection, you would soon know when the poultice was ready. You could hear Mom dashing up the stairs (she had to because it was so hot she could hardly carry it) singing at the top of her voice, “Here comes Rose with a red hot poultice, she slaps it on and takes no notice!” The skin on your chest would peel for three days, but at least your infection would be gone.
I hated Saturdays. The day would actually start well with a slice of bread toasted on the coal-fire and covered in beef dripping (lovely and hot with a salt and pepper dressing). But every Saturday was the day of the dreaded coke run (coal with the tar and chemicals removed, leaving a slow-burning, porous coke nugget). Just as soon as we had enjoyed our last morsel of toast, Mom would issue our marching orders to go to the gas works. The mission would be to take our wheelbarrow to collect our ration of 1cwt of precious coke.
As you turned the corner by the old St. John’s Church into Pleck Road, we were confronted with the daunting vision of a two-abreast queue snaking down, past the pub, round the corner, up Prince Street, up to the gate and right down the long drive — hundreds! (it appeared like hundreds) in the queue, the hated queue. It only moved every few minutes, so judging by the amount of people in front of me and our Billy, we were going to be there for HOURS! How the Gas Board treated us left me scarred for life. There was only ever one man serving and one man taking the money and they had the manners of pigs (no, that’s unfair to pigs!). It was scandalous really with the amount of people that needed to be served. I wanted to scream at the top of my voice, but I was just a child, and in those days, you had to be seen and not heard. That’s what I like about the younger generation; they’re so idle they will not be ‘dumped on’ by anyone.
By the time we had struggled home with the coke, Mom would flip a coin to decide which of us went back near to the Gas Works for a fish and chips lunch. I always seemed to lose the spin. Mom always favoured Billy so I think she used to fix the toss! Again, there would be a queue that would snake all around the shop and out of the door — never in my entire life did I ever see it any different, it was always full. Just as you finally got to the front and went to open your mouth to place your order, you would be interrupted by the screechy voice of Mrs. Rollingson with “you’ll have to wait for chips, they have only just gone in.” I often felt she did this in spite, just to me, to make me wait all the longer. Many times I would be left near to tears.
My queuing experience made me vow that I would never stand in a queue ever again. Even to this day, I would rather walk away and do without, than stand in a queue. I am the first one to complain bitterly to our local DIY store. There are six tills at their disposal, but even on a ‘Wrinklies Day’, (10% off for the over-60s), you can expect to see a queue of thirty or so people with only one till working! I am sure the owners of this chain of stores could save a fortune on tills that are never utilised. I estimate that they cost about £3,000 each so they could make a saving of at least £15,000 in my local store alone!
Dad worked until 1pm on Saturdays so would always be back home by the time I returned with the fish and chips. Soon after we had enjoyed the feast, the next assault would unfurl. “Come on then”, Dad would say, “get the bikes and sacks out of the shed”. We’d then set off to Bentley Hall Estate, on the grounds of the historic family of The Lanes (Lady Jane had escorted King Charles to safety from the battle of Worcester.) The Hall, by this time, had been knocked down the family seemed to have abandoned the site. Many small mines sprang up by people trying to mine enough coal out of the ground to keep there families warm, we had some very severe winters during the War years, with 1947 being one of the worst winters on record, several hundred people gathered there on a Saturday picking coal-chippings from the slag-heaps discarded by the army of Pit Men. Some got killed attempting to dig their own mines. I was told that a huge seam of coal runs through this country deep in Kent, coming nearer to the surface in Warwickshire and Staffordshire, and going deep again further north. When contractors built the M6 motorway, it cut through Bentley (now Junction 10) and at only 10 feet deep they were pulling up pure coal. Hundreds descended on the site and the police had to be called.We would return home late on Saturday afternoon, tired and dirty, and with a few bags containing bits of coal. We would then mixed it with the coke to make enough fuel to last the week, it wasn’t good fuel, bits of slate known as “cracker” would sit in the fire, become hot and then spit red coals all over the hearth going off like firecrackers hence the name “Cracker”.
One day Mom and I were standing in the garden. It was a lovely peaceful day, but then we heard one solitary aircraft flying low and fast. We could see that it was German. My brother, Billy and all the other children were in school. Our garden ran onto the school perimeter and I could clearly see the pilot’s face grinning at me. He was laughing and strangely he looked very Chinese to me. Mom was screaming at him, “Please, not the school, God, not the school!” The bombs fell crazily from the plane’s open doors. We watched helplessly as they fell, and we saw the flash. Something suddenly picked us both up and flung us at the back door. It really hurt, and I started crying, but not because of the pain, because Mom was so upset, and it seemed I was crying in sympathy. Later on, Lord Haw-Haw said on the radio, “Today we have bombed Birmingham Gas Works.” They had not. They had bombed Walsall. Amazingly, not one person was lost. Several houses were demolished but each one was empty as the people were all out working and helping the War effort. The Gasometer was gone, but the Gas board deserved it, I have no sympathy, if only because of those accursed queues only one person slightly injured. When we heard Mom and Dad discussing that it was the Gas Works, Billy and I both thought “great, great, no more queues!”
Sunday was the unofficial slaughter day because the Ministry of Food Inspectors never worked on a Sunday. If you had managed to conceal a pig on your premises (we all had something) and it was ready (fat enough), Sunday would be when the poor animal met its fate! The Ministry men would preside over an official slaughter to examine the conditions and procedures (hygiene etc.) then on behalf of the State, take half of the animal away “because of the rationing” (I really would love to know what actually became of that meat.) The unofficial way would mean the total spoils for the breeder. The perpetrators would grab the pig under cover of darkness but the poor animal would always give them away as he would let the whole world know they were about to kill him. The screams would be dreadful, and Mom would simply comment, “there’ll be some pork about tomorrow”, and sure enough, after a few days, we had pork for dinner! And of course my favourite pork dripping on toast with loads of salt and pepper — fantastic, my mouth waters at the very thought!
We had a hundred or so chickens, with registered customers for eggs, and half a dozen cockerels. They were Rhode Island Reds, nasty beasts that always attacked you when you went in the pen to collect the eggs. One particular Cock, Bruce (after the boxer, Bruce Woodcock) would grab hold of the back of my leg, which was especially painful, because I wore short trousers. When our customers requested a bird for Christmas dinner, he was top of the list! That bird had lumps off me. When I stood in the bath, filled with just a drop of water, plucking all the birds ready for the table, I kept telling him how he had brought it on himself, and how he was going to die regretting it! Plucking was a terrible job. All the feathers would get up your nose, especially Mom’s and mine as we had the biggest ‘hooters’ but gutting was worse and oh, the smell! Dad would kill about 20 birds in a session over the drain in the yard using a sharp knife. Sometimes the head came right off and when he let go the poor bird would do a lap of honour around the yard with its head in the drain singing, “I ain’t got nobody!” It’s a wonder Bill and I never had nightmares. I once watched Mom skin and clean a rabbit that Uncle Jack had caught at the back of the Copper Works that morning. It was rabbit stew for dinner that night with pearl barley and dumplings — fantastic!
Bill Clements, my best friend’s Dad, was a lorry driver who frequently went to Liverpool Docks with goods and when he returned, he would always have acquired a block of chocolate the size of a large biscuit tin. When he pulled up outside his home, our tribe would descend upon it with axes, saws, hammers, chisels, anything that may have cut through it but it was as hard as concrete. You could hit it with a huge blow from an axe, only to remove a tiny morsel of chocolate. It took hours of hard labour to reduce it to nothing. It tasted of cocoa, and wasn’t all that sweet. God only knows if it was fit to eat, but none of us lot came to any harm (except for the hammered fingers) so it must have been OK.
Our entertainment was mostly in the street. The gaslights left a lot to be desired, and the only effective light was immediately under the lamp itself with pools of blackness between, which made it ideal for ‘Hide & Seek’. Some games would go on for hours, like ‘Tip Cat’ a game played in the dark, in our case a combination of hide and seek whoever became nominated by eeny meeny minny mo system, would have to be in the circle, the striker would take hold of the handle similar to a broom stick striking the tip quiet hard on the end, because of the shape, similar to a huge cigar shaped at each end, when hit it jumped up in the air to be hit again by the striker projecting it several yards away, whilst the retriever chased after it to bring back to the circle everyone else in the game disappeared behind garden gates privet hedges, anywhere out of sight, with the poor retriever having to discover us, the first one caught was the next in the circle, then the Tip cat would be hit again. There would be football in teams, with the top half of the street playing the bottom half. Inevitably someone would get kicked a bit too hard, or pushed, followed by an obligatory fight. The girls would play Hopscotch, Rounders, or Group Skipping. We never had to worry about being run over, as we had no motorcars on our estate with the exception of Mr. Humphries. He wasn’t allowed any petrol so he would get his car out on a Sunday morning, clean it, and put it away again. The only vehicles using our street belonged to the Co-op or horse & carts delivering bread, milk, coal or grocery. After 5.00pm you would never see a vehicle in the street until the next morning when the milk was delivered. Bread wasn’t wrapped up, and you would often see a loaf of bread on the doorstep, open to ‘all and sundry’ that may fall upon it. The family would arrive home, take the bread in and use it without a second thought.
Our local ‘Copper’ lived in the street and if he caught you ‘up to no good’ such as scrumping (stealing apples from someone’s trees), he would give you a ringing belt around the ears, and you never told your Dad because he would have given you another one! Our Copper’s patrols were done on pushbike.
It was a Monday and I hated Monday’s too. This day was dedicated to the chore of all chores — washing! The very thought of it raises the hair on the back of my neck and my palms go clammy and damp! Mom would start the day at the crack of dawn. Dad was lucky, he could run off to work but we weren’t so lucky and even if it was a school day, you had to perform chores before and during school and on your lunch-break. Only near death could get you excused from washday duties. The previous week’s ashes had to be removed from the fire, newspapers had to be wrung together like wringing a wet sponge and laid at the bottom of the fire-box with several dry selected bits of firewood placed over the paper. Then you would attach a light and stand back. The boiler was made of a cast iron pot about 18 inches in diameter and about 18 inches deep, mounted in brick and dominating a huge chunk of the kitchen. It would be filled with water to the maximum and when you opened the chimney flue-box fully, the flames would roar up the chimney, soon boiling the water into cascades of steam into every room of the house, with every window and door or aperture open to the elements, regardless of the weather. Sometimes it was freezing and the whole house would look like a station platform waiting for some huge express train to leave. There was a hive of activity of stoking, prodding with the boiling stick, dangling the ‘Rickets’ blue bag until it disappeared, stirring, lifting, tossing, sheets, shirts, pillows, socks, nighties and knickers. There was no sanctuary from the pain, nor peace or tranquillity. Mom would occasionally appear amidst a fog of steam, near the sink, dowsing sheets from the boiler to the tap, rinsing, prodding and squeezing. We would interrupt the proceedings to request food — no chance — “Get yourself a carrot to scrape, that will keep you going” she would retort, so we would slip into the pantry for a slice of bread and butter, cut like a door step and smothered in Bee Top brown sauce. We needed to build our strength up for the next step, which was more of an experience than a task.
Mom would introduce you to the ‘Maid’ — a stick of a young thing, with a head liken to a castle-top, with handles for shoulders, made of soft wood, standing up to its neck in the beer barrel she had acquired for a tub. I could just about peer over the top into its murky depths. She would demonstrate with great vigour how to beat the living daylights out of our laundry — you would slap your hands on the handles and set it going up and down like a Navvy’s jackhammer! The momentum would take over, and sometimes it was difficult to stop! I did not know which was worse, maiding or wringing a huge handle attached to two large wooded rollers known as the mangle, which had gears and cogs, all at eye-level to me! Mom would spin these with great gusto, and on command, you would attempt to attach yourself to the handles, whilst in a fair old lick of speed, sheets would disappear into one side and come out the other, releasing gallons of water in the process, and all the time these cogs and gears would rumble just past my nose, teeth into teeth, with the smoothness of a Rolls Royce. By the time Dad was due home from work, wash day may would be drawing to a close. On a nice day the sheets would be cascading down the garden like the sails of a regatta but on a bad day, slung across from corner to corner of the living-room with the rest of the evening like being on board a tea-clipper with the full rigging above your head!
Uncle Ernie acquired an American Red Indian motorcycle with long handlebars like steer horns. It had running boards for footrests, which ran the whole length of the bike. It was a noisy beast. One day he invited Dad to get on the back for a ride, so having accepted the invitation, Dad cocked his leg over the saddle with Ernie giving the accelerator some ‘wellie’. The noise and vibration were enormous. At the split second that Dad placed both feet on the road to adjust his seat, Ernie let the clutch soaring off like a Boeing 747! Time froze for two seconds then gravity kicked in depositing Dad on his ‘pride’ with a bump. Ernie went 15 miles before he had to pull up in traffic outside Burton’s window (the tailor’s shop) and saw that he was alone! This was quite a shock and he worried all the way back to the point where he actually lost Dad. Poor Dad never did get that ride!
Uncle Jack, my Dad’s brother, was a very easy-going fellow, in fact as half-soaked as you can get. He and Aunt Lill had a motorcycle combination. Having no children (of course I never knew why), they had a few ‘bob’ between them and on Sunday mornings, Jack would disconnect the sidecar from the bike chassis for cleaning purposes. Now, only two steel-set screws secured that bike to the side-car in a tubular frame, made by Swift of Walsall and it was top of the range. One Sunday afternoon they set off to go to Kinver Edge. Everything started out very smoothly with Aunt Lill (who was a bit of a snob) sitting like The Queen behind the Perspex screen. It was only when Jack was accelerating away towards Wolverhampton and they were approaching the first ‘Y’ junction, that things went horribly wrong. At first nothing seemed untoward, the side-car was upright, but as Jack proceeded towards Kinver Edge, Aunt Lill headed off towards Dudley! It was only when the axle dropped that Lill became aware of the sparks that were dancing around the cockpit and a distinct smell of burning. She travelled for quite a way, poised on one wheel, which was driven by the momentum and Jack was totally oblivious to the situation! Eventually, all was well — well nearly. Lill didn’t speak to Jack for weeks, and the bike was never ever used again!
Jack joined the R.A.F. He was in a bomber crew as a Sergeant Bomb Aimer aboard Lancasters. He went to do the full tour of duty and I understand he undertook almost 20 operations. I was very proud of my Uncle Jack. Aunt Lill went on to become an Ambulance Driver. She also enjoyed the company of Yanks, which went down very badly with my Mother who had been brought up in a very strict regime. We often heard Mom and Dad discussing her antics while Uncle Jack was away at War. Things came to a head when one Saturday night, Mom and Dad popped into town for a drink. Unfortunately, Lill, a very good-looking woman, was in the company of American Soldiers. Now my Mother had flame-red hair, with a temper to match, being a Watkinson of Irish decent. She stood the situation until she reached breaking point, and then finally snapped. She flew across the room, taking a number of chairs and tables with her and had landed quite a few punches before the Yanks knew what had hit them. This was nothing new for Mom, as when she lived with her brothers, she would fight as hard as any man. Anyway, mayhem ensued, with our poor Dad trying desperately to pull Mom out of the chaos, as she was involved in a tirade of abuse, with “slut” being top of the list and punches were being thrown left, right and centre. Eventually, calm was restored when the Licensee threw both Mom and Dad out of the pub and to add insult to injury, they were now barred for life! Both women never ever did speak to each other again and Aunt Lill looked the worse for wear for quite some time!
Dad said he never liked that pub anyway. He complained that it was highly unlikely that you would be served unless you were a regular customer. The Licensee would not actually refuse to serve you, but according to Dad, he would serve everyone around you, leaving you in the middle of a crowd feeling like a ‘mug’. If you did get served, you were only offered the ‘smackers’ which was beer that was drawn off the pumps and tap trays — the slops! After the War, Dad went out of his way to pay a visit to this particular pub. Now, beer was plentiful and Licensees were ‘breaking their necks’ to serve you. Dad went into the pub, told a tale of friends following him and then went on to order a large tray of mixed drinks. When he asked how much the round was and received his reply, he promptly told the Licensee to “stick ‘em” and reminded him of the times he had stood at this bar trying to get served and how he had waited years for this moment! Dad said look on the Licensee’s face made his day!
Scientists today are debating ‘cloning’. The women of 1942 were all ‘cloned’. Every single woman I remember looked the same — about 6-7 stone in weight (because a lot of them gave up their food to their husbands and children, even though they were already rationed) They wore a blue, green or patterned wrap-around overall, with no make-up or nail-polish and of course, the stereotype head-turban. The effect of the War certainly made them look like ‘death warmed up’. The head-turban was a square scarf, folded diagonally across the corners. You would take both ends in each hand, tie a knot on top of the forehead, leaving the corner draped over the head, tuck in the ends, fold the corner back off the forehead and there you had it — the headdress worn by the entire population, from factory girls to housewives to land girls. That’s how they looked, all the same, everywhere. Only on Fridays or Saturdays would they ‘doll themselves up’ with lipstick and Pond’s Cream, put on their best dresses and wash their legs with a solution of sand and water to make believe they were wearing stockings. When their legs had been painted and dried, a girl friend would take a soft lead pencil and from bum cheek to heel, scribe a straight line down the back of each leg. These were ‘poor girls’ nylons’, which became a bit of a problem if it started raining on the way to a dance, but most times, did the trick!
The exception was the ‘floozy’ down the road, She was not a clone and there was no overall for her. She only wore pencil-slim skirts with proper nylons, large blouses with huge sleeves, painted nails and always make-up — never without make-up. Blonde curls billowed out over her shoulders and she would have a big American ‘fag’ in her ‘trap’ — she was a ‘cracker’. Women hated her and men dreamed on! When collecting her Jimmy from school, no one ever spoke to her. All those ‘knives in her back’ must have been painful! Men would always give her a smile and hold open the door, if only to have an excuse to watch her walk away and the Butcher always found her a bit extra. I used to play with her Jimmy at their house and it’s funny, he never had Monday’s washday blues and I never did see her ‘red cardinal’ the quarry tiles in the kitchen like my Mom did!
The food cooked for our chickens consisted of boiled potato peelings in a large saucepan, mashed and covered in a very fine powder known as ‘meal’. The smell of the brew was enough to put you off your dinner, but the fowl loved it. When the meal-bag was empty, mom would wash it and then hang it out to dry. She would then slit the sides and lay it out flat. For weeks she had been bullying everyone into cutting old pieces of cloth into 6 inch strips or even old suits, skirts and anything heavy and woolly. Cutting would bring up the blisters on your fingers through having scissors too small for the job. We would all spend hours cutting on the dining-table — having said that, everything was done on the dining-table, because that’s all we had — the scrubbed white table with four chairs, an old battered piano (Dad could only play “Begin the Begin” which he had taught himself parrot-fashion, the rendition was murder!) and a clothes cupboard with the radio mounted inside it by Dad. Getting back to the cutting, when Mom had had enough of this coarse material, she would then take a huge sewing-needle with a really big eye, pass the 6-inch strips through a hessian sack about half way and pull the material through one side. When she had totally covered the sack with cloth, she would sew another sack over the top of the first one. When she turned it over, you would have these strips of material facing upwards. It was called ‘bodging’. Bodging a rug — a sort of shaggy rug story!
Clinic day was always on a Wednesday. We had to have a bath and put on our best clothes to visit the nurse and then she would make you take them all off again, look in your ears, up your nose, down your throat and in your hair for nits. She would look at your teeth and nails for those telltale signs — calcium deficiency, or lack of white blobs on your nails. Some of the nurses were most unpleasant, and their fingers were always freezing cold. One was particularly unpleasant. She never wanted the job but the Ministry would not just send her the money! Her face was always like thunder and she handled us like dirty dressings ‘at arm’s length’. Anyone could see that she really hated the job — she issued pure orange juice, cod liver oil, malt extract (waste from beer), at the rate of one spoonful per day (no wonder we went on to be ‘boozers’ being weaned on it) and American dried egg powder that made fantastic scrambled eggs. It was beautiful stuff, but that cod liver oil, oh! we loathed it! One tablespoon per day was bad enough. Mom would always lace it with condensed milk, which made it taste sweeter than honey.
Aunt Nance was a beautiful woman with the heart of a Saint and she would speak to the ‘floozy’ with no problems. Aunt Nance always saw the good in everyone and she had nothing, in fact her house was worse than ours, but even then, she would invite you to share in what little she had. Being the eldest, Nance was ‘Mother’ too. Grandad was injured badly in the 1916 War and his scars left him in constant pain but when able, he would clean windows for pennies. Grandma made Nance follow him everywhere so that when the customer paid for the windows, Nance would beg for the money to buy bread or grocery. If he managed to keep the money, he would go straight to the pub and stay there until the money had gone, or he was ‘Blindo’. To make matters worse, Grandma was as bad. Given the chance, she would get as drunk as him. Both of them kept my Mother’s family on the verge of living in the workhouse and inevitably, Grandad’s war injuries killed him not long afterwards. It was this ‘having nothing’, the constant poverty that drove Aunt Nance to watch every penny. She would only do her shopping when the shops were about to close. She would walk down to the market, at the end of the day when traders would be getting rid of their stock at ‘rock bottom’ prices and finally, giving it away rather than taking it back. There were no fridges or cold stores in those days and all the stock had to go on a daily basis. Then she would walk back. Walsall would be about a 3-mile trip, but like all of us then, she walked everywhere.
My Father’s family was not much better off, so both our parents understood how it was to have nothing. That generation appreciated the small things we all take so much for granted now. Our parents brought us up in a relatively modern council house (as all my relatives managed to do) and all through the bad years, I was so proud of them — Mom’s brother and sisters, husbands and wife.
With the accumulator fully charged, we could stop the roar of the London traffic to “Buy some violets, lovely violets”, have tea in the Palm Court Hotel, send a record request to a Force’s sweetheart via John Metcalfe or Cliff Michelmore, listen to “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn, or even learn to dance with Victor Silvester. Mom and Dad sent for the course. For each dance you would receive brown paper templates of someone’s feet! They would roll back the bodged rugs and lay flat the paper cut-outs and wait for Silvester to start the lesson. The men would tread in the gents’ steps and the women in the ladies’ steps — it was a sight for sore eyes, with a couple of grown-ups holding each other in front of the radio, feet together, apart, listening to the tempo, stepping forward and back and we could hear Dad complaining, “Step out Rose, you won’t lose anything!” Later, they would go on to dance to Henry Hall and his dance night. They entered a competition in the Church Hall for the Quick Step and won first prize, which was a wall mirror. We had that mirror years. Personally, I preferred Paul Temple with his Flying Scots music.
A special treat was to go to the cinema as a family this particular night did not turn out so nice! Mom came up with a brilliant plan to cope with the transport arrangements but the trouble was, Dad wouldn’t know anything about them as he had gone to work. There were no mobile telephones in those days and you could only use the phone-boxes in life or death situations. It was arranged Dad would go straight to the Savoy where he would meet us in the ‘cheap’ seats leaving his cycle at work, we were taking his sandwiches. Mom’s plan was that one of us would go down to Dad’s factory, Hanford Greatrix Leather Works and collect the bike so it would be ready for his use the next day. We duly reported to the ‘copper’ on the gate in security who promised faithfully that he would tell Dad that we had his bike — well perhaps he would have done, had his shift not changed! The police were called and they turned up (try that today for a bike). On investigation, it was agreed that the bike had been stolen. In the meantime, we are all in the cinema craning our necks to spot Dad. He was busy with the Police and out of the goodness of their hearts, the ‘coppers’ gave Dad a lift home in a lovely shiny Wolsley 12 (imagine that today!) All the neighbours were glued to the windows shouting “police, police!” One ‘copper’ suggested that we have a look in the shed, just in case. Dad’s heart missed a beat as he caught a slight glimpse inside the shed. “You’re never going to believe this”, he said, as he let the shed lock slip away, revealing his bike in all its splendour! Both the coppers left shaking heads in disbelief. By now we had left the cinema and were on our way home with Mom, who was fuming in the belief that Dad had forgotten. Dad was contemplating murder, how could she do this? He came home long after us, when we were tucked up in bed and he was little worse for wear. Although we were in bed, we were not asleep and oh what a row! As I saw it, all Mom had to do was apologise, but no, she was the one most upset. Dad had “ruined her night” — typical woman!We had some fine cinemas, the best being The Savoy or The Gaumont — they were both on a par really. My wife, Joan and I went on to have our Wedding Reception at the Kenmare Gaumont Restaurant in 1957. There was red carpet all around and plush red seats and we sat down to a chicken salad meal with a prawn starter. There were sixty or so guests, “an arm and a leg” by today’s standards — must have had more money than sense! Goodness knows what our Nance would have said about spending so much money.
One day, Father decided to paint the parlour and said, “Go to Wilkes and fetch me a ball of whitener”. Wilkes was our local shop that sold everything from firewood to sweets, cigarettes to paraffin and candles to cucumber. If you could think of it, Wilkes would have it. A more miserable pair you would ever wish to see in your whole life. Mrs. Wilkes had frizzy hair standing off her head as if she had received an electric shock and never wearing make-up. She was just straight up and down and always wrapped up in a ‘pinny’. Mrs. Wilkes would never serve a child. It didn’t matter how long you had waited, it would only be when a grown-up would say, “this child is before me” that she would acknowledge their existence (Mr. Wilkes was just as friendly). “A ball of whitener please? She handed it across to me wrapped up in an old newspaper, which was quite heavy to carry all the way back home. When I finally got back, Dad dropped it in a white enamel bucket, began to break it up with a knife, added water and as the ball got smaller, the bucket got fuller of distemper. Using a whitewash brush, he started painting the walls and when several coats had been applied, it would finally be left to dry. He would add a cloth-dye to the remaining solution to change the colour and soak an old tea towel in it. Then he would mould the tea towel into the shape of a dog’s bone and holding it loosely in the palm of his hand, roll it over the nearly painted white walls. The dog’s bone shape would raise a pattern — ‘stippling’ it was called; The poor man’s wallpaper!
Being of Italian descent, Norman Diccico talked ‘a lota lika thata’ and was Walsall’s answer to the Mafia. He rode around on a fridge fitted with wheels and handle bars for steering, a sort of fridge cycle. Norman would shout, “Geta ya isas, lavoley isas.” He travelled all over the place and must have covered miles. In the winter, he pushed this heavy cart a mobile cooker. He would trundle down Stafford Street and park this flaming fire-bucket onto his pitch outside the New Imperial Cinema. It was coal-fired and had about five drawers containing potatoes. Around Christmas, he would sell hot chestnuts too. A fantastic smell would drift down the street and the salted potatoes with charcoal skins tasted out of this world, for just three pence a bag. He would stand there for hours in all weathers, shouting, “Geta ya lovoley roasta tatas!”
Dad said, “Pop up the road to the ‘witch’ at Wilkes and fetch me two woodbines.” Yes, two ‘fags’ were two-penny halfpenny each. “Don’t let her fob you off with them stinking ‘pashers’, if she has no ‘woodies’ you can tell her to stick the funny stinking fags”. Dad, Jack and Uncle Ernie all smoked John Player’s Navy Cut, (when they could get them) in fact when they were smoking them, it looked just like a frigate or a cruiser coming in to dock! Everyone smoked; when you visited the cinema the air would be that thick, the projector would cut huge beams through the dense smoke blankets. A chorus of coughing in tune with the symphony of blowing noses would accompany the film from start to finish. On the upstairs level of the first morning bus the poor conductor would be almost consumptive. You would see some old chaps nearly bursting blood vessels in their throats, but who still refused to put the fags out. On foggy days the smog would drop like a stone, stick to your eyelids and your mouth would look as if you had been eating liquorish. It was dark and dank, there was coughing and choking and in my opinion, the whole bus should have been driven to the nearest decontamination unit but of course, it would only have to turn around at the terminus ready for the next lot. We are today told to avoid passive smoking, but there was no passive smoking on board these double-deckers, it was down right deliberate!
You could walk to town past Mr. Woo’s, the Chinese Laundry who specialised in stiff collars, starched and white as snow. It was one penny per collar. He worked from a tiny little shop, with steam clouds rolling across the footpath and he was always open. As we passed, we’d sing the George Formby classic, “Oh Mr. Woo, what can we do? Mr. Woo`s a window cleaner now”. All mens’ shirts came with a loose collar fitted by a front stud and a rear stud, officially known as ‘the back stud’. To emphasise how most men would describe them, you needed fingers like pincers to fit them and then when in place, if the starch didn’t chaff your skin red raw, the studs slowly but surely almost choked you to death! What a pain they were.
Carrying on past Pellari’s Ice Cream Parlour and Confectionary, their peanut toffee was unbelievable (if you had enough sweet coupons) — sheer bliss! I remember going past Dance’s Coffee Shop, where roast coffee-beans were ground in a machine in an open window and where huge roasts of beef and pork lay piping hot on trays of gravy and crackling, for sandwiches made in Heaven. There was also home-made bread with stuffing — a mixture of aromas that sent you into ‘seventh heaven’ (despite the slightly unhygienic exposure to the flies).
Occasionally we would dine out. Freddie’s Oyster Bar, who did beautiful fish and chips with a round of bread and butter served on a plate with a cup of tea. It was fantastic — to our family this was The Ritz! One Saturday, Father was drooling over a dressed crab and he went out of his way to collect one. Visualising it with a sprig of watercress, his mouth watered at the mere thought. On arriving home he placed the crab on the cold slab in the pantry and retreated down the garden to clean out the chickens. Several hours later, Mom went into the pantry to prepare Dad’s tea. She sighed, “It’s his fault,” he never shuts the door behind him. I’ve told him before but he’s always the same”. Mom poured fuel on the fire that was already raging in my Dad. Apparently, the cat had sneaked in the pantry and purloined Dad’s dressed crab! The cat was now in a very precarious position, but with the full protection of my Mom, she shouted, “It’s no use blaming the cat, it’s only natural!” However, my Dad was wishing the poor cat several unnatural occurrences!
Travel was not encouraged, in fact, posters everywhere asked, “Is your journey really necessary?” Only service personnel travelled extensively. Corridor trains were being introduced but the straight-through carriage type was still in abundance, with ten seats either side of a carriage. On a long journey you would have to have a very strong constitution to hold out for the whole trip. On reaching the destination, there always appeared to be a gentle move towards the toilets but with a definite sense of urgency. Young servicemen would relieve themselves ‘en route’, which was a very dangerous procedure at 60mph!
Big white fivers, pound notes, ten shillings, half crowns, florins, bobs, pennies, three-pennies and Joey’s farthings. The average wage was four pounds and ten shillings. A loaf of bread was four and a half pence; a pint of beer was a bob and a penny and you could get a ride on a bus for a penny. You could take out life insurance with ‘One Penny Policies’ from ‘The Man From The Pru’. A gentleman called every Friday night for two pence. He was a towering man of six feet plus, in a smartly tailored suit and tie — a perfect gentleman. He covered his round on a huge cycle made by Raleigh of Nottingham. I understand he had over 2000 clients and his mileage on that bike all over Walsall must have been outstanding. You could tell he was a gentleman as he always removed his bicycle clips on entering the house. This man commanded respect by his very nature and Mom and Dad always treated him so. Doctor’s Panel Cover for the whole family was only six pence per week. Clothes obtained by practical checks, (yes “checks” not “cheques”) were also six pence per week. ‘Save Now Buy Later’ checks would be issued when you were in credit. Most shops displayed signs reading, ‘Practical Checks Taken Here’.
A visit to the Doctors, however, would only be as a last resort. Our doctor was a huge man. Dr. Llewellyn reeked of whisky, with a bedside manner similar to that of a raw recruit in the Army and his Sergeant Major! The Waiting Room was painted dark brown, lit by a very low lamp. Everyone was cramped up on tight long benches, and all you could hear was coughing and barking (you always seemed to come out with more than what you went in with.) If the doctor looked in your ears, he would stretch them yards. Mom took me to see him as I had a nervous disorder, and quite often I would flinch. My whole body would react as if I’d been touched with an electric charge! “No, nothing to worry about”, came the terse reply, “It’s only ‘the tick’.” “Can’t understand that”, Mom said, “he never goes near sheep!” I still have it today, about once a day, even though the big man said, “He will grow out of it.”
Our Coal merchant delivered by the bag “Watch him”, Mom ordered, “count how many bags he puts in that coal-shed. I’ll swear he never put six bags in there last time. I’ve never trusted him.” This wassupplemented by our Coke ration and coal pickings
Growing up in the peace of the ‘50s’ was pretty wonderful compared to the dreadful ‘40s’. There was great music, clothes, food, washing machines, fantastic cinemas and films, the Windsor knot, drainpipe trousers and the ‘D.A.’ hairstyle, (a duck’s backside!). Prime Minister Harold MacMillan said, “We have never had it so good.” How right he was. Will the United Kingdom ever be the same again I wonder?

Acknowledgements
jgards
Peoples War

Homer Simpson Wisdom

2010-04-12T00:03:00.004+01:00

God bless those pagans.

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Don't let Krusty's death get you down, boy. People die all the time, just like that. Why, you could wake up dead tomorrow! Well, good night!

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If you really want something in this life, you have to work for it. Now, quiet, they're about to announce the lottery numbers.

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You couldn't fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine.

Understatement

2010-04-12T00:02:00.001+01:00

They missed him - she didn't!

Brainteaser

2010-04-12T00:01:00.007+01:00

Today's brainteaser takes the form of a riddle. Can you come up with the answer?

Read the sentence below and determine what the four uppercase words have in common.

As you put down your bowl of STEW and take your SEAT, you let out a SHOUT and leap back up; you sat on a THORN!

Quite tricky. Good luck! Answer in tomorrows Journal.

Looking Back - British Agree To Singapore Self-Rule

2010-04-11T00:05:00.001+01:00

On this day in 1957, the British government allowed the island colony of Singapore to govern itself under a new constitution agreed in London.
The Singapore Constitutional Conference ended after four weeks of talks when Chief Minister of Singapore Lim Yew Hock and Alan Lennox-Boyd, secretary of state for the Colonies, signed an agreement.
The constitution was to come into effect some time after 1 January 1958 when the colony would become known as the State of Singapore.
Britain was to remain in charge of external affairs and defence.
Subversives barred
There was, however, one major pre-condition that the Singapore delegation would not agree to - that "persons known to have been engaged in subversive activity" would be barred from standing for the Legislative Assembly.
This demand, aimed at excluding extremist left-wing activists in the People's Action Party (PAP), some of whom had been detained for inciting anti-British riots the previous year.
At the signing ceremony at Lancaster House, Mr Lim rejected this demand as "a departure from normal democratic practice" but agreed to put it before the Legislative Assembly.
Under self-government, the office of Governor was to be abolished and replaced with a Malayan-born representative of the Queen known as the Yang di-Pertuan Negara.
An internal security council preventing subversion was to be set up under the chairmanship of the UK Commissioner charged with safeguarding British affairs in the territory.
Resignation over failed talks
The previous April, David Marshall, first Chief Minister of Singapore, led a delegation to London to ask for internal self-government with the aim of achieving independence or "merdeka" in Malay.
The talks failed, and as a result Mr Marshall resigned as Chief Minister in the June. He was succeeded by Lim Yew Hock.

A few days later former Chief Minister David Marshall resigned from the governing Labour Front in protest at the agreement which he felt did not go far enough. He called it "a pock-marked beauty shrouded in chloroform".
The Constitutional Agreement was finally signed in London on 28 May 1958 and self-government achieved after Singapore held general elections in 1959.
The first government of the State of Singapore was sworn in on 5 June with Lee Kuan Yew as Prime Minister.
It joined the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 and became totally independent in 1965, nearly 20 years after it was made a British crown colony.
The People's Action Party (PAP) has been the dominant political force since independence.

Excuses

2010-04-11T00:04:00.001+01:00

Marbles

2010-04-11T00:03:00.005+01:00

A marble is a small spherical toy usually made from glass, clay, or agate. These balls vary in size. Most commonly, they are about ½ inch (1.25 cm) in diameter, but they may range from less than ¼ inch (0.635 cm) to over 3 inches (7.75 cm), while some art glass marbles for display purposes are over 12 inches (30 cm) wide. Marbles can be used for a variety of children's games, and are often collected, both for nostalgia and for their aesthetic colors.

History
Marbles are often mentioned in Roman literature, and there are many examples of marbles from ancient Egypt. They were commonly made of clay, stone or glass and commonly referred to as a "Glass alley".
Ceramic marbles entered inexpensive mass productionin the 1870s.
A German glassblower invented marble scissors in 1846, a device for making marbles. The first mass produced toy marbles (clay) made in the US were made in Akron, Ohio by S.C Dyke in the early 1890s. The first US glass marbles were also made in Akron by James Harvey Leighton. In 1903, Martin Frederick Christensen of Akron, Ohio made the first machine made glass marbles on his patented machine. His company, The M.F. Christensen & Son Co. manufactured millions of toy and industrial glass marbles until they ceased operations in 1917. The next US company to enter the glass marble market was Akro Agate. This company was started by Akronites in 1911, but was located in Clarksburg West Virginia. Today, there are only two American based toy marble manufacturers: Jabo Vitro in Reno, Ohio and Marble King, in Paden City West Virginia.
Gameplay
One version of the game involves drawing a circle in sand, and players will take turns knocking other players' marbles out of the circle with their own marble. This game is called ringer. Other versions involve shooting marbles at target marbles or into holes in the ground (such as rolly or rolley hole). A larger-scale game of marbles might involve taking turns trying to hit an opponent's marble to win. A useful strategy is to throw a marble so that it lands in a protected, or difficult location if it should miss the target. As with many children's games, new rules are devised all the time, and each group is likely to have its own version, often customized to the environment. While the game of marbles was once ubiquitous and attracted widespread press to national tournaments, its popularity has dwindled in the television age.

World championship
The World Marbles Championships have been held at Tinsley Green, West Sussex, England every year since 1932. (Marbles has been played in Tinsley Green and the surrounding area for many centuries:TIME magazine traces its origins to 1588.) Traditionally, the marbles-playing season started on Ash Wednesday and lasted until midday on Good Friday: playing after that brought bad luck. More than 20 teams from around the world take part in the championship, each Good Friday; German teams have been successful several times since 2000, although local teams from Crawley, Copthorne and other Sussex and Surrey villages often take part as well;3] the first championship in 1932 was won by a team from nearby Hookwood.

Today's Smile

2010-04-11T00:02:00.002+01:00

Thought For Today

2010-04-11T00:01:00.003+01:00

In all the work we do, our most valuable asset can be the attitude of self-examination. It is forgivable to make mistakes, but to stand fast behind a wall of self-righteousness and make the same mistake twice is not forgivable.
Dale E. Turner

Malcolm McLaren

2010-04-10T11:05:00.004+01:00

It was announced this week that Malcolm McLaren (pictured left in 2009), former manager of the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls, had died. In this article we take a look at the life and career of the man who brought Punk music to the attention of the world.

Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren (22 January 1946 – 8 April 2010) was an English performer, impresario, self-publicist and former manager of the sex Pistols and the New York Dolls.

Early years
McLaren was born to Pete McLaren, a Scottish teenaged war deserter, and Emmy (née Isaacs) in post-World War II North London. His father left when he was two and he was raised by his maternal grandmother, Rose Corre Isaacs, the formerly wealthy daughter of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish diamond dealers, in Stoke Newington. McLaren told Andrew Denton on Enough Rope, that his grandmother always said to him, "To be bad is good... to be good is simply boring". In The Ghosts of Oxford Street he says Charles Clore (who bought Selfridges) became his mother's lover. When he was six, McLaren's mother married Martin Levi, a man working in London's rag trade. When McLaren was in his forties, a Sunday newspaper found Pete McLaren in an English "greasy spoon garage".
McLaren's stepfather and mother owned a shmatte factory in London's East End called Eve Edwards London Limited. They lived well but Malcolm and his stepfather never got along. He left home in his teens. Following a series of jobs (including one as a wine taster), he went on to attend several art colleges through the 1960s, being expelled from several before leaving education entirely in 1971. It was during this time that he began to design clothing, a talent he would later use when he became a boutique owner.
He had been attracted to the Situationist movement, particularly King Mob, which promoted absurdist and provocative actions as a way of enacting social change. In 1968 McLaren had tried unsuccessfully to travel to Paris to take part in the demonstrations there. Instead, with Jamie Reid, he took part in a student occupation of Croydon Art School. McLaren would later adopt the movement's ideas into his promotion for the various pop and rock groups with whom he was soon to involve himself.

The New York Dolls and SEX
In 1971, McLaren and his girlfriend, the designer Vivienne Westwood, opened a London clothing shop called Let It Rock on the King's Road. The shop sold Teddy Boy clothes and McLaren and Westwood also designed clothing for theatrical and cinematic productions such as That'll Be The Day and Mahler. Let It Rock proved a success but McLaren grew disillusioned with the style of shop owing to problems with the Teddy Boys who were the shop's main customers. McLaren's son by Westwood, Joseph Ferdinand Corre, co-founded the lingerie brand Agent Provocateur.

Later life and death
McLaren met Korean American Young Kim at a party in Paris; she became his girlfriend for the last 12 years of his life. She moved in with him in 2002; they lived together in Paris and New York. He died of mesothelioma on 8 April 2010 in a clinic in Switzerland. His body will be flown back to England to be buried in Highgate Cemetery, North London. Malcolm McLaren's death bed last words were "Free Leonard Peltier."
McLaren travelled to New York City for a boutique fair in 1972 having already met the group the New York Dolls. That year he renamed the outlet at 430 Kings Road Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die and supplied the group with stagewear. In 1975, McLaren designed red leather costumes for the New York Dolls and used a Soviet-style hammer and sickle motif for their stage show as a provocative means of promoting them. This ploy was not successful and the Dolls soon broke up. However, it was while he was managing the Dolls that he first saw the Neon Boys perform. The Neon Boys included Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell, who were later to form Television. In April 1975, McLaren returned to Britain, by which time he had renamed the store SEX, selling S&M (sadomasochistic) style clothing.
The Sex Pistols
By 1976, McLaren had started to manage The Strand, the band who would later become the Sex Pistols. He soon convinced them to kick guitarist/songwriter Wally Nightingale out of the band and also introduced them to bassist Glen Matlock (who worked in SEX). His assistant, Bernie Rhodes (soon to be manager of The Clash), spotted John Lydon who was then sporting green hair, and torn clothes with the words "I hate" scribbled on his Pink Floyd shirt. His appearance and attitude impressed McLaren, and Lydon, now dubbed "Johnny Rotten", was brought in to audition as a new frontman. Rotten joined, and the band was renamed The Sex Pistols (McLaren stating he wanted them to sound like "sexy young assassins").
In May 1977, the band released "God Save The Queen" during the week of Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee. McLaren organised a boat trip down the Thames where the Sex Pistols would perform their music outside Houses of Parliament. The boat was raided by the police and McLaren was arrested, thus achieving his goal to attain publicity.
The band released their album Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols in October 1977 and played their last UK gig before embarking upon an American tour in January 1978. This tour saw the band split up after a series of arguments. During his time managing the band McLaren was accused by band members (most notably by John Lydon) of mismanaging them and refusing to pay them when they asked him for money. McLaren has stated that he had planned out the entire path of the Sex Pistols, and in the film, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, he set this plan out. The film was criticised for allegedly being too skewed towards McLaren and for being a launchpad for McLaren's future career in music as a performer (he performs the Max Bygraves song "You Need Hands" in the film) as well as a manager McLaren kept the Sex Pistols' contract rights until Lydon took him to court in the 1980s to win the rights and unpaid revenues from McLaren. Lydon won and gained complete control from McLaren in 1987. McLaren and Lydon refused to speak to each other after the band split. In the 2000 film, The Filth and the Fury, the surviving members of the Sex Pistols put their version of events on film.

Solo musical career
In 1983, McLaren released Duck Rock, an album which mixed up influences from Africa and the Americas, including hip-hop. The album proved to be highly influential in bringing hip-hop to a wider audience in the UK. Two of the singles from the album ("Buffalo Gals" and "Double Dutch") became top-10 hits in the UK. He then turned to electronic music and opera in the 1984 single "Madame Butterfly", based on the opera. The track is arranged with drum machines, atmospheric synthesizers and spoken verses. It reached #13 in the UK and #16 in Australia. The producer of the single, Stephen Hague, became a much sought after producer in the techno pop genre following his work with McLaren on the following full length LP, Fans.
McLaren's 1989 album Waltz Darling, was a funk/disco/vogueing inspired album. Waltz Darling incorporated elements of his former albums, i.e. spoken verses, string arrangements and eclectic mix of genres but featured such prominent musicians as Bootsy Collins or Jeff Beck with a glitzy, Louisiana-style production aimed at the US market. The singles, "Waltz Darling" and "Something's Jumpin' in Your Shirt" became top-20 radio hits in Europe, with the single "Deep in Vogue" bringing voguing to the attention of the world long before Madonna.
In 1992, McLaren co-wrote the song "Carry On Columbus" for the feature film of the same name. The song plays over the end credits of the film. In 1994, he recorded the concept album Paris, with French artists such as Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Hardy.
In 1998, McLaren released Buffalo Gals Back 2 Skool (Virgin Records), an album featuring hip hop artists like Rakim, KRS-One, De La Soul and producer Henri Scars Struck revisiting tracks from the original Duck Rock album. In addition, that year, he created a band called Jungk. This project was not a commercial success. Also in 1997/1998, he released a track called "The Bell Song". Various remixes were released on 12" singles.
His song "About Her", based on "She's Not There" by The Zombies, rose to prominence when used by director Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill Vol. 2. He was accused of plagiarism for this song in 2005 for allegedly copying the work of a French musician, but was cleared of the charges in November 2005 when the court in Angers, France threw out the case. The song uses Esther Bigeou's "St. Louis Blues" by repeatedly playing the verse, "My man's got a heart like a rock cast in the sea."
McLaren's solo work, particularly from the Duck Rock period, has also been sampled by other artists. In 1999, a group called Dope Smuglazz had a UK top twenty hit with the track "Double Double Dutch" which made extensive use of samples from McLaren's original "Double Dutch". In 1997, Mariah Carey's "Honey" and "Honey (Bad boy remix)" sample "Hey DJ (Buffalo Girls)." In 2002, Eminem released a track called "Without Me", which sampled McLaren's song, "Buffalo Gals". In 2007, McLaren's song "World's Famous" was sampled by R&B singer Amerie on the song, "Some Like It", from her album Because I Love It.
In 2006, author Paul Gorman published his book The Look: Adventures In Rock & Pop Fashion with a foreword and contributions from McLaren. The book included a CD featuring the track "Deux" from the Paris Remixes album.

Sign Of The Times

2010-04-10T11:04:00.001+01:00

Chinese Dwarves Big On Popularity

2010-04-10T11:03:00.001+01:00

I have just been reading a story by Dan Martin of AFP news which I thought might interest you.

In an imperial yellow coat and stylish shades, China's dwarf emperor toddles from his tiny mushroom house to rapturous applause and a welcoming volley of ear-splitting techno music.
Barely a metre tall, the mini-monarch squats proudly on a royal stool as his court of dwarves and midgets -- dressed as fairies, warriors, cooks, and monks -- regale hundreds of paying visitors with a high-pitched, syrupy ballad.
China's imperial days may be long gone, but this scaled-down version lives on at the "Dwarf Empire", a popular attraction at a theme park that opened in September in southwestern Yunnan province.
The "empire" -- part of a butterfly park -- has quickly become the site's main draw thanks to the popularity of dwarf performances that would likely evoke howls of protest in the West as an exploitative freak show.
It includes a mini version of "Swan Lake", and there's even a male dwarf in leather pants and a punk hairdo hand-walking and gyrating his hips to thunderous hip-hop.
But the more than 100 dwarves -- known in China as "xiao ai ren", or "little small people" -- who range in height from 79 centimetres (2 feet 7 inches) to 1.3 metres, dismiss suggestions the park demeans them.
Several call it a haven in a country where their kind often face harassment and mistreatment and rarely get to mix with like-sized comrades.
"Before coming here, most of us faced discrimination. But here, we are equal and respected. We have our dignity," said Ou Jielin, 24, who sold clothing in the southern province of Guangdong before coming to work at the park.
Nestled in rugged hills about 40 kilometres (25 miles) west of the Yunnan capital Kunming, the park is the brainchild of flamboyant businessman Chen Mingjing, who made his fortune in electronics, real estate and other ventures.
His hair slicked back and wearing a high-collared Chinese jacket not unlike that of the dwarf emperor, Chen said the idea came to him after he encountered midgets on a train.
"We felt their lives were hard and bad, so we wanted to build a great place for them to live and a platform for them to work," said Chen.
Employees get room, board and free English lessons -- to chat with a hoped-for flood of overseas visitors. Few can get past "Hello", however, except for one who introduced himself as being from the empire's "Foreign Ministry".
Altruism aside, dwarves are good business.
On a recent day, Chen's empire heaved with hundreds of mostly-respectful teenagers from Kunming, cheering wildly and posing for photos with dwarves.
Chen is expanding the "empire", which now consists of more than a dozen

mushroom homes from which the dwarves emerge and descend to their performance area.
A nearby hill is topped by a fortress-like emperor's "castle" opening later this year. New dwarves arrive weekly.
"We will build a team of 800 to 1,000 dwarves and make it the biggest wonderland for dwarves in the world," Chen proclaimed.
Dwarves acknowledge the park could be seen as demeaning in the West, but say it is a step up for "little people" in China, whose opportunities in life are sometimes quite limited.
Chinese dwarves need to be tough, said Pi Fasi, who faced bullying and was even robbed in his previous job driving a three-wheeled transport vehicle. He says he has fought to defend himself his whole life against schoolmates and even adults.
"Some would even be crying after I used my fists and legs," he said proudly.
Fittingly, he is now the emperor's personal bodyguard, vowing to "stay at the park until I am too old to work."
Homesickness hurts, but life with fellow dwarves has changed the fate of people like Ou, who fell in love with another of the dwarf employees and hopes to marry.
"I feel this is our destiny. We came from different places in China but have come together to live as a family. We are all very happy," she said.

Today's Smile

2010-04-10T11:02:00.001+01:00

Signs Of Growing Old

2010-04-10T11:01:00.001+01:00

You no longer think of speed limits as a challenge.

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You consider coffee as one of the most important things in life.

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8 a.m. is your idea of 'sleeping in'.

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You don't remember when you got that mole or the one next to it.

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You write thank you notes without being told.

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Neighbours borrow your tools.

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You answer the question with "Because I said so!"

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Looking Back - Saddam Statue Topples With Regime

2010-04-09T00:05:00.004+01:00

On this day in 2003, there were scenes of jubilation in Baghdad as US tanks rolled into the very heart of the Iraqi capital, confirming that the government of Saddam Hussein had been ousted from power.
In the main square in Baghdad, a group of Iraqi men attempted to pull down a massive statue of Saddam Hussein in an unprecedented show of contempt for the Iraqi leader.
The metal plaque at the base of the statue was torn off and the statue's marble plinth attacked with a sledgehammer.
The men scaled the statue to secure a noose around its neck but were unable to pull it down.
Then US troops joined in, and used an armoured vehicle to gradually pull down the statue.
Flag controversy
The extraordinary scenes were watched by millions across the world live on television.
The square is opposite the Palestine Hotel, used as a base by the world's media during the war in Iraq.
A little before the statue came down, a US soldier climbed up and draped the face with a US flag.
The crowd did not welcome the move, seeing it as a step too far towards American triumphalism, and the flag was quickly removed.
A few minutes later, it was replaced by the old Iraqi flag, to roars of approval.
Contempt
As the statue fell to the ground at last, the crowd surged forward and jumped on it.
Chanting and jeering, they danced on the fallen effigy, kicking it and hitting it with their shoes in a symbolic gesture of contempt as it was torn to pieces.
They then severed the head, tied chains around it, and dragged it through the streets.
As news of the events in the square spread, more and more Iraqis gathered to watch, with women and children joining the crowds of men.
There were similar scenes across the capital, as the many hundreds of statues and pictures of Saddam Hussein that came to symbolise his regime were attacked and torn down.
The military campaign will continue, although the US Army has delivered its most upbeat assessment yet of the gains it is making in Iraq.
"Much of Iraq is free from years of repression," said Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks, the US Central Command spokesman in Qatar.
"With every day that passes, we are breaking the grip of the regime."

The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue became one of the enduring images of the war in Iraq. Although there has since been some speculation that it was staged by US forces.
One BBC correspondent, who was in Paradise Square and watched the statue being pulled down, said his impression was of "a newly free people" expressing their "overwhelming joy".
US troops continued to advance north for another week, taking key towns such as Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit, before President Bush declared victory on 1 May.
The honeymoon period for US troops was short.
In the power vacuum which followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, law and order broke down and US troops became targets for many Iraqis resentful of the continuing occupation.
In the six months after the war ended, more US soldiers died in guerrilla attacks and suicide bombings than during the whole of the war.
Saddam Hussein himself was captured in December 2003. He was tried by and Iraqi court, sentenced to death and was hanged on 30 December 2006.

To watch pictures of US tanks entering Baghdad click on the following video link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_6220000/newsid_6221512.stm?bw=bb&mp=wm&news=1&bbcws=1n

He Really Should Have Known Better

2010-04-09T00:04:00.004+01:00

Click on image to enlarge

Today's Smile

2010-04-09T00:03:00.002+01:00

An inexperienced preacher was to hold a graveside burial service at a pauper's cemetery for an indigent man with no family or friends. Not knowing where the cemetery was, he made several wrong turns and got lost. When he eventually arrived an hour late, the hearse was no where in sight, the backhoe was next to the open hole, and the workmen were sitting under a tree eating lunch.

The diligent young pastor went to the open grave and found the vault lid already in place. Feeling guilty because of his tardiness, he preached an impassioned and lengthy service, sending the deceased to the great beyond in style.

As he returned to his car, he overheard one of the workmen say to the other, "I've been putting in septic tanks for over twenty years and I ain't never seen anything like that.

Britain's Underage Binge Drinkers

2010-04-09T00:02:00.001+01:00

More On Computers

2010-04-09T00:01:00.001+01:00

I haven't lost my mind - its backed up on tape somewhere.

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ISDN = It Still Does Nothing.

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Windows VirusScan 1.0 - "Windows found: Remove it? (Y/N)

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Windows has detected a mouse movement. Please restart Windows so changes can take effect.

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WW2 Peoples War - Wartime Butcher's Boy-Folkestone

2010-04-08T00:05:00.004+01:00

This is the 2nd part of Ivor Bail's wartime memoir. The 1st part, entitled "A Good Prospect" deals with his experience as an evacuee in Tintern.
These memoirs were typed by Fiona McNeill of the Folkestone Heritage Team and added to the site with the author's permission.

Homecoming
My return to my home at 88 Guildhall Street after evacuation to South Wales was brought about because I had reached the school leaving age of 14, and it was time to seek employment in Folkestone.
I had no idea what job I wanted to do, as opportunities were not great due to the wartime conditions existing in the town.
After some enquiries my mother found me a job with a local butcher who needed a delivery boy, and so it was I went to work for 'F.R. Hills Family Butcher', 31 Cheriton Road Telephone - 3436, for the weekly wage of twelve shillings and six pence (62.5p)
My job entailed delivering peoples' meat rations to their homes, mostly on Fridays and Saturdays. The meat ration being rather meagre it was only families who, using all their rations could expect a joint of meat for 'Sunday roast' a person living alone usually finished up with a small chump end of lamb.
Rations could be supplemented with liver or other items of offal, but this was always in short supply, sausages however were a food source more readily available. The sausages manufactured at 'Dick Hills' butcher shop and other butcher shops, due to shortages - contained a lot more rusk than meat, as opposed to today’s product containing more meat than rusk!
I was introduced to the art of sausage making, mixing meat trimmings rusk and seasoning, and operating a large mincer which needed turning by hand.
Meanwhile, all was not quiet in and around Folkestone, German aircraft made regular visits to town, flying in from France acros the Channel, keeeping low to the sea. Then suddenly swooping above the rooftops to drop their bombs on us. Often no air raid warnings sounded because the low and swift approach avoided prior detection.
These became known as 'Tip and Run' raids and it was believed the pilots were newly trained and sent across to gain experience on their first mission.
One morning in April, soon after the shop opened I witnessed my first 'Tip and Run' raid.
As I was arranging meat packages in my delivery basket, I heard the sound of air craft over head. Within seconds, several loud explosions occured.
Everyone in the shop ran to the doorway, and we could see a dense black, wide column of smoke incorporating red and orange tongues of flames, rising rapidly above the houses in the direction of the Foord Road area.
It wasn't long before we learned that the gas holder behind Bradstone Avenue in the 'Brickfields' was the seat of the fire, water escaping from the holder flooded people's houses in the avenue, regretfully one person was killed in this raid. It was a dramatic start to my days work!
Sundays saw me at Christ Church, singing in the choir along with other lads under the direction of the organist and Choir Master, Mr Jenner. I remained in the choir serving as Head Choir Boy until the fateful day on which the church suffered from one of the Lufftwaffe's 'Tip and Run' raids.
Sunday morning May 17th 1942, I was just setting out from home to attend church when the raiders swept in and dropped several bombs. After the explosions, the sky in the direction of Christ Church was filled with smoke and dust and hundreds of little white objects all fluttering in mid air. I didn't realise it at that moment but these were pages from the hymn and prayer books.
Reaching the church, I was confronted with a scene of grim devastation, the main body of the church was totally destroyed. Only the tower at the Western end was left standing.
Gravestones in the church yard having been uprooted, lay midst piles of rubble in the roads nearby, some hymn and prayer book pages still hung in the air above the ruins drifting gently along, never to be sung or prayed from again.
I met other members of the choir, and as we surveyed the dreadful scene we discussed how lucky it was the raiders visit did not come 20 minutes later, when the service would have been in progress and we and all the soldiers on church parade would have been inside.
Sadly the Verger Mrs Ansell, and an early worshiper lost their lives.
The tower has been preserved and remains as a monument on the site which is now a Garden of Remembrance". At the Eastern end of the garden an indentation in the lawn reminds me where the underground vestry we so often attended used to be.
The church services were transferred to Holy Trinity Church just up the road but were never quite the same for us choir boys.
Meanwhile, I was making steady progress in my role as butcher's boy learning a good deal about the trade and Mr Hills seemed well pleased, so pleased in fact that I decided having been in his employ about twelve months, I might be justified in seeking a rise for my efforts.
My request came as a bit of a shock to Mr. Hills and it took him two weeks before reaching a decision. After some deliberation with his wife, who managed the cash office, he awarded me a 2/- (10p) increase, bringing my wage to the princely sum of 14/6d (72.5p) per week - I went forth rejoicing!
I did not benefit from this wage increase for long because I was offered another job elsewhere and I left F.R. Hills to go to work at 'Worsells' the butchers No 3, The Old High Streeet Tel. - 3101.
'Worsells' was owned by the firm J. H. Dewhurst and my starting wage in their employ was a fabulous almost unbelievable 23 shillings (£1.15) per week. The manager Mr Arthur Matthews was a great boss and through his guidance and tuition I eventually reached the celebrated status of 'butcher's cutter'.
I learned, among other things, how to use the scales, which were balance scales, complete with highly polished brass weights. These ranged from 7lbs down to the tiny 0.5 ounce that hung on a piece of string to avoid loss. This little weight was flicked onto the scale pan using the attached string, just as the balance was on the turn consequently slightly increasing the price.
I also learnt butchers back slang, a away of conversing used in the trade in order to convey information on the shop floor without customers being aware of the topic.
The price of meat in those days was quite reasonable, leg of lamb 2d-3d per lb, though these were mostly boned out and used with pork to make sausage meat.
Talking of sausage meat reminds me of an embarrassing moment when I was sent to deliver 6lb of it to the Queens hotel just up the road.
On the delivery cycle where the basket fitted, were two wooden slats. Instead of using the basket for the short delivery I placed the sausage meat on these slats. Unfortunately, just as I approached the traffic lights at the top of the road they changed to red. Applying the brakes to slow down and stop caused my parcel to shoot forward onto the roadway and I neatly divided the contents into two separate 3 pounds of sausage meat having sliced it with the cycles front wheel.
Filled with dismay I hastily retrieved the damaged goods and continued the journey to the hotel. Descending the steps leading down to the kitchen, I made a half way stop in order to examine the two portions. Some sausage meat I discarded as it had suffered Dunlop tyre rash! Then uniting the two halves into 6 pound less about 3 ounces and roughly rewrapping the whole, I entered the kitchen trying my best to appear the innocent butcher’s lad. The chief Mr Sprenger greeted me with open arms as he desperately awaited this order. I returned to the shop bearing a feeling of guilt.
My delivery round took me about two miles out and around the Cheriton area of Folkestone, often through the duration of air raid warnings. But his didn't worry me a great deal as I subscribed to the general attitude existing at that time - 'If your names on it you'll get it where ever you are!'
The policy of J. H. Dewhurst during wartime was; goods must be paid for, cash on delivery, this rule to be strictly adhered to, and so I had to collect the money from every customer. Weekly or monthly accounts were no longer an option, just in case your name was on it, and you got it, and the firm didn't!
One Saturday afternoon, in August 1942 a number of enemy aircraft raided the town, dropping several bombs, one of which fell a few doors along the road from my home in Guildhall Street.
This bomb hit 'Funnels' Butcher shop and a dairy next door known as 'Gammons'. The dairyman Mr Fisher who was resting in the back room was unfortunately killed.
On the opposite side of the road 'Franklin’s' grocer shop suffered considerable damage. My mother, who worked in this shop, was at the time serving her own mother, they and others in the shop had a lucky escape but the luckiest escape of all was by a baby outside the shop in its pram. The blast from the bomb brought down the shops canvas blind, which enveloped the pram protecting the child from the flying glass and falling masonry.
Hearing the news I left my work place to visit the scene. Reaching my home, I found the front windows all smashed and, going inside, discovered my grandmother, the only occupant at the time busy clearing up the fallen kitchen ceiling. For a 92 year old she was coping very well, her comments on the situation and reference to 'Herr Hitler' I best not print!
On November 9th 1942 the enemy decided to operate their long range guns. Newly installed along the French coast, they opened fire about 8 pm. and bombarded the town causing considerable damage and casualties. Shells fell in the lower part of the town and around the harbour some exploding in mid air. This part of town became known locally as 'The Shelling Area'.
Shelling of Dover and Folkestone became a regular occurrence. Gun duels took place between our long range guns at St Margaret’s at Cliff and the Germans in the Calais area.
Once an engagement started it was impossible to know when it might finish. Even though there were 'shelling warnings' activated when the first shell landed, and the 'all clear' sounding if nothing fell after one hour.
The German gunnery officer was obviously wise to this procedure, and would fire another shell after about 1 hour 15 mins. So a lethal game of cat and mouse developed, similar to a heated argument when each person seeks the last word, except this was who fires the last shell.
Eventually, after the 'D Day' invasion by the allies, our troops overran the gun emplacements situated on the French coast, the enemy gun crews did their best to fire off their stock of shells before capture. Dover and Folkestone bore the brunt of this action.
The shelling on this final occasion started in the early hours of the morning and I was awakened by the first explosion but remained in bed, our dog 'Monty' took cover with me under my blanket. We were not to stay like this for long because a shell landed in the grounds of the clinic (Old Harvey Grammar School) next to our back garden. It demolished our large garden shed. At the same time, blast from the shell blew out my bedroom window depositing glass over the bed and into the room. 'Monty' fled, and I decided I ought to get up. I left my bed just in time to the sound of a second shell, which fell in almost the same crater caused by the first. Blast from this one, blew the complete window frame out of its setting and onto the bed, plus dirt dust and masonry.
I went downstairs to join my parents and sister and we all retreated to a large cupboard under the stairs, as this was considered to be the safest place in any house.
The shelling continued until first light and extensive damage was caused around the town. 88 Guildhall street suffered damage to the rear of the house, also ceilings inside came down.
Our neighbours next door, Mr and Mrs Saunders, inspecting damage to their property discovered a piece of shrapnel embedded in the walnut veneer on the front of their much cherished radiogram. They left it in place as a souvenir from 'Jerry'.
The next day Wednesday (D-Day + one in military terms) in the afternoon after work, I visited the seafront. Standing on the Leas promenade and looking across the Channel I beheld a most impressive sight.
Far out at sea were two aircraft flying parallel to the French coast, each in turn laying down a thick smoke screen. Close to our shoreline, a huge convoy of ships was underway. As far as the eye could see in either direction, there were cargo ships, escorted by warships, three and four abreast, many of these vessels flying barrage balloons.
This was a wartime scene of historic importance which I will never forget.
Having endured bombing and shelling up to this stage in the War, Folkestone now looked very much in a knocked about condition, with bomb sites and shell damage all over town. Adding to this the fact that many businesses had closed and moved when invasion threatened, leaving their premises boarded up, the picture was rather bleak to say the least.
However, in spite of the situation the townsfolk remained steadfast, and spirits stayed high.
There were many troops of all nationalities stationed in the town, the Navy had headquarters in the Royal Pavilion and Princess Hotels known as 'H M. S Allenby' under the command of Vice Admiral Round Turner. The Army, with British and American troops, occupied other hotels and houses vacated by the greatly reduced civilian population.
Two doors from my workplace at 'Worsells' above 'Burtons' the tailors the Americans ran a club for their troops entitled 'Do Nut Dug Out.' We supplied them with sausages and in return sampled their delicious 'Dough Nuts'.
On top of Burton's roof a group of our soldiers manned a machine gun, its purpose to shoot down low flying raiders. Although they fired once or twice, they never managed to fulfil their purpose, maybe other emplacements had more success.
Late one evening when I was at home, the air raid sirens sounded a warning, and plenty of activity soon took place.
Anti aircraft fire from guns on the hills and search lights sweeping the sky, caused my sister and I to go and observe events from her bedroom window at the top of our house, where we had a good view towards the hills behind the town. We saw what we thought were enemy aircraft under fire, and receiving direct hits setting them on fire. We assumed they were bombers heading for targets in land.
Next morning, the radio and newspaper gave vivid accounts to explain the nights action. What we had witnessed was the first attack by Hitlers V1 (Vengence One) pilotless planes, not only pilotless but minus a propeller to draw them along.
Their means of propulsion was a crude jet engine bolted to the rear of the fuselage, flames spurted from this unit and misled us when watching into believing our gunners had scored hits.
These weapons carried a nasty lethal pay load of explosives and were intended for London. When reaching the city, the engine would cut out due to fuel starvation, resulting in a descent to ground, sometimes in an acrobatic fashion, ending with a terrific explosion causing damage and destruction in all directions.
This travelling bomb became known as 'Fly Bomb', 'Buzz Bomb' or more popularly the 'Doodlebug'.
Although aimed at, and intended for London, hundreds were shot down overland and into the sea along the coast, particularly in the Folkestone area.
The 'V1' was followed later by the 'V2' a rocket propelled bomb also directed towards London. Having greater accuracy than the 'Doodle Bug'. Fortunately for us, Folkestone never received any, the nearest falling in the Maidstone area.
One afternoon I was on the Leas with a friend when approaching 'Doodlebugs' came under fire from American Anti-Aircraft guns and British 'Bofor’s’ guns.
We watched as the V1s flew into a box barrage, the air being peppered with bursting shells, shrapnel from the shells appeared to float down like feathers and land with a tinkley sound all around us. We took cover under the Leas Cliff Hall Balcony because we knew this red hot metal could give us nasty injuries.
As the barrage continued, the V1's flew through it and went on their way unscathed. Shells from 'Bofor's' guns had little effect on this aircraft, but American shells with higher explosive often scored direct hits bringing many down, mostly in the sea. Unfortunately, some American shells missing their target failed to detonate, returning to earth unexploded. One such shell from this barrage hurtled back, landing with a whooshing noise close to one of the gun emplacements. Burying itself deep in the lawn leaving a neat round hole marking its entry. As far as I know it remains to this day in the area of the Leas Bandstand.
My experiences as a working lad during these War years included many unpleasant events, too numerous to mention, unless writing a book, but I have put down some of the more outstanding in this short account.
At last, on May 28th 1945, hostilities came to an end, the day to be named V.E. Day (Victory in Europe.) Great celebrations took place, especially in the evening when troops and civilians gathered on the Leas. The Leas Cliff Hall was soon packed to capacity and the doors shut, but enterprising para troops secured a rope over the balcony and many more entered the hall by means of the rope, making the hall packed to over capacity.
High spirits in this rejoicing crowd led to cups, saucers, glasses and even seats being thrown over the balcony onto the lower seafront as everyone went wild.
Bonfires were lit along the Leas Promenade, bench seats and anything wooden were used to fuel them.
Returning home with friends, we picked up a life size effigy of 'Adolf Hitler' which I had constructed earlier in the day. We conveyed the 'Fuhrer' through the streets to the Leas and cast him onto the biggest of the bonfires there.
Huge cheers filled the smokey night air as the defeated dictator burned.
On August the 14th 1945 the Japanese in the Far East War surrendered.
This was as a result of an Atomic bomb the Americans dropped on the city of 'Nagasaki' on August 8th causing catastrophic destruction as great as the first Atomic bomb dropped two days before on 'Hiroshima'.
The 15th of August was declared 'V.J. Day (Victory in Japan) and once again the whole country celebrated.
Having survived these momentous Wartime events I had reached the age of 17.5 years which meant I was approaching 'Call Up' into the armed forces.
I decided to join the Navy in preference to waiting to be conscripted in to the Army, or possibly being selected as a 'Bevan Boy' (conscription into the coal mines) when I reached 18 years.
As it turned out, the Navy had no vacancies, but vacancies existed in 'The Royal Marines,' an important part of the 'Royal Navy'.
I applied and passed the necessary tests and medical for H.M. Royal Marines. On October 2nd 1945 I travelled to London and reported for final enlistment at 'Alhambra House' in Charing Cross Road.
The Manager of ‘Worsells’ (J H Dewhurst) at the end of the War, left to open his own butchers shop in Hythe which became a well known and successful business, before leaving he wrote me the following reference dated 12th September 1945;
[Telephone No 3101 3, High Street Folkestone, 12/9/1945W. Worsell Family ButcherProprietors: J.H. Dewhurst LtdPickled TonguesScotch and Southdown MuttonEnglish and Scotch BeefFamilies supplied with the very best quality on the most reasonable terms]
Ivor Bail has been employed by me during the past three years, during which time I have found him to be an honest, sober, willing and industrious worker, his character is of the highest integrity and his success in life regarded as certain. Arthur H Matthews (Manager).

Acknowledgements
Kent Libraries-Shepway District
Peoples War

I Guess The Sleigh Broke Down

2010-04-08T00:04:00.002+01:00

Tasseography

2010-04-08T00:03:00.004+01:00

Tasseography (also known as tasseomancy or tassology) is a divination or fortune-telling method that interprets patterns in tea leaves, coffee grounds, or wine sediments.
The terms derive from the French word tasse (cup), which in turn derives from the Arabic tassa (cup), and the Greek suffixes -graph, -logy, and -mancy (divination).

History
Scotland, Ireland, and England have produced a number of practitioners and authors on the subject, and English potteries have crafted many beautiful tea cup sets specially designed and decorated to aid in fortune-telling. Cultures of the Middle East that practice divination in this fashion usually use left-over coffee grounds from Turkish coffee turned over onto a plate.
Method of tea-leaf reading
The Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology, Fifth Edition, Vol. 2 edited by J. Gordon Melton, notes:
After a cup of tea has been poured, without using a tea strainer, the tea is drunk or poured away. The cup should then be shaken well and any remaining liquid drained off in the saucer. The diviner now looks at the pattern of tea leaves in the cup and allows the imagination to play around the shapes suggested by them. They might look like a letter, a heart shape, or a ring. These shapes are then interpreted intuitively or by means of a fairly standard system of symbolism, such as: snake (enmity or falsehood), spade (good fortune through industry), mountain (journey of hindrance), or house (change, success).
Melton's described methods of pouring away the tea and shaking the cup are rarely seen; most readers ask the querent to drink the tea off, then swirl the cup. Likewise, his notion that readers give intuitive interpretations reflects his unfamiliarity with teacup reading; most readers use the standard symbols that have been handed down through several generations. There are, however, many who prefer to read by feel and intuition, as stated by Melton.
It is traditional to read a cup from the present to the future by starting along the rim at the handle of the cup and following the symbols downward in a spiral manner, until the bottom is reached, which symbolizes the far future. Most readers see images only in the dark tea leaves against a white or neutral background; some will also read the reverse images formed by seeing the symbols that form in the white negative spaces, with a clump of dark leaves forming the background.
Some people consider it ill-advised for one to attempt tasseography using tea from a cut-open tea bag or to use a symbol dictionary. The reasons for these prohibitions are practical: tea-bag tea is cut too finely to form recognizable figures in the cup and tea-leaf reading has its own historic system of symbolism that does not correspond exacty with other systems, such as symbolic dream divination.
Fortune telling tea cups
Although many people prefer a simple white cup for tea leaf reading, there are also traditions concerning the positional placement of the leaves in the cup, and some find it easier to work with marked cups. Beginning in the late 19th century and continuing to the present, English and American potteries have produced specially decorated cup and saucer sets for the use of tea-leaf readers. Many of these designs are patented and come with instructions explaining their mode of use. Some of the most common were those that were given away with purchases of bulk tea.
There are dozens of individual designs of fortune tellers' cups, but the three most common types are zodiac cups, playing card cups, and symbol cups.
Zodiac cups
These sets contain zodiacal and planetary symbols. Typically the interior of the cup contains the planetary symbols, while the saucer has the astrological sign symbols, but there are many variations and exceptions to this common pattern. The placement of these symbols allows the reader to combine astrology with tasseography.
Playing card cups
These cups carry within their interiors tiny images of a deck of scattered cards, either 52 cards plus a joker, as in a poker deck, or 32 cards, as in a euchre deck. Some sets also have a few cards imprinted on the saucers, or the saucers may contain brief written card interpretations. The playing cards permit the reader to creatively relate cartomancy to tasseography.
Symbol cups
These sets are decorated with between a dozen and fifty of the most common visual cues that can be found in tea leaves, often numbered for easy reference and supplied with an explanatory booklet. The symbols are generally displayed inside the cups, but there are also sets in which they decorate the outside or appear in the cups and on the saucers.
Coffee reading
Traditionally, coffee readers use Turkish coffee, or any coffee that has grinds that sit at the bottom of the cup. Most of the liquid in the coffee is drunk, but the sediment at the bottom is left behind. It is often believed that the drinker of the coffee should not read their own cup.
There are at least two forms of coffee reading. Both require that the cup be covered with the saucer and turned upside-down. Some traditions, such as in Romania, require that the sediments in the cup be swirled around the inside of the cup until they cover the majority of the cup's inside surface. Other traditions, such as Turkish and Middle Eastern, do not require this swirling but do require that the cup be turned towards yourself for showing your own fortune. The coffee grounds are given time to settle and dry against the cup before a reading begins.
Many interpretations for symbols exist, but one common thread is the color of the symbols. Since most cups used are white or ivory and the grounds are dark, strong contrast exists for the symbols. White is considered a "good" symbol foretelling of generally positive things for the drinker, while the grounds themselves are considered to form "bad" symbols.
Symbols can be many things, including people, animals, and inanimate objects. Usually, the fortune teller will group nearby symbols together for a prediction.
After a reading, the drinker will be asked to "open the heart". This is done by placing the right thumb at the inside bottom of the cup and twisting clockwise slightly. This will leave an impression behind that the fortune teller will interpret as the drinker's inner thoughts or emotions.
Some symbols and their meanings include:
Apple
achieving knowledge, completing school, getting diploma
Flying birds
good news
Candle
enlightenment
Cat
a deceitful friend or relative
Dog
loyal friend or relative
Kite
wishes will come true
Raven
death or bad news

In 2007, a coffee-reading fortune teller from Israel was charged with practicing magic, a crime punishable by up to five years in jail. The fortune teller in question was acquitted of the charges after the Israeli Gov. deemed it too hard to prove she was knowingly 'faking it'.

The New Uri Geller? Yeah Right!

2010-04-08T00:02:00.001+01:00

The Legend That Was George Best

2010-04-08T00:01:00.001+01:00

George Best (22 May 1946 – 25 November 2005) was a Northern Irish professional football player, best known for his years with Manchester United. He was a winger whose game combined pace, acceleration, balance, two-footedness, goalscoring and the ability to beat defenders. In 1968, his annus mirabilis, he won the European Cup with Manchester United, and was named the European Footballer of the Year. When fit, he was an automatic choice for the Northern Ireland team, but he was unable to lead them to the World Cup qualification, despite being capped 37 times and scoring nine goals.
In 1999, he was voted 11th at the IFFHS European Player of the Century election, and 16th in the World Player of the Century election. Pele named him as one of the 125 best living footballers in his 2004 FIFA 100 list and Best was named 19th, behind Gerd Muller, at the UEFA Golden Jubilee Poll. In his native Northern Ireland, the admiration for him is summed up by the local saying: "Maradona good; Pele better; George Best."
He was one of the first celebrity footballers, but his extravagant lifestyle led to problems with alcoholism which curtailed his playing career and eventually led to his death in November 2005 at the age of 59. His cause of death was multiple organ failure brought on by a kidney infection, a side-effect of the immuno-suppressive drugs he was required to take after a liver transplant. In 2007, GQ named him as one of the 50 most stylish men of the past 50 years.

Early years and family
George Best was the first child of Dickie Best (1920-2008) and Anne Best (née Withers) (1923-1978), and grew up in Cregagh, Belfast. Best had four sisters, Carol, Barbara, Julie and Grace, and a brother, Ian. Best's father Dickie died on 16 April 2008, in the Ulster Hospital in Dundonald, Northern Ireland. He had been admitted to hospital four weeks earlier. Best's mother Anne died from an alcoholism-related illness in 1978, aged 55.
In 1957, at the age of 11, the academically gifted Best won a scholarship to Grosvenor High School, but he soon played truant as the school specialised in rugby. Best then moved to Lisnasharragh Secondary School, reuniting him with friends from primary school and allowing him to focus on football.

Club career
Manchester United (1963-1974)
At the age of 15, Best was discovered in Belfast by Manchester United scout Bob Bishop, whose telegram to United manager Matt Busby read: "I think I've found you a genius." His local club Glentoran had previously rejected him for being "too small and light". Best was subsequently given a trial and signed up by chief scout Joe Armstrong.
Best made his Manchester United debut, aged 17, on 14 September 1963 against West Bromwich Albion at Old Trafford in a 1-0 victory. He was too young to contend for a first team place for much of the first half of the season. His second appearance came on 28 December against Burnley. This First Division match saw Best's first goal for United in a 5 - 1 win. Matt Busby used Best much more after the New Year and by the end of the season, Best had made 26 appearances, scoring six goals. Manchester United finished second, four points behind Liverpool.
In his second season, Best and Manchester United claimed the league title.
Best hit the headlines at the age of twenty when he scored two goals in a European Cup quarter-final match against Benfica in 1966, and his long hair prompted the Portuguese press to dub him "El Beatle".
Best's talent and showmanship made him a crowd and media favourite. Called "the fifth Beatle", for his long hair, good looks and extravagant celebrity lifestyle, he even appeared on Top of the Pops in 1965. Other nicknames included the "Belfast Boy" and he was often referred to as Georgie, or Geordie in his native Belfast. (Pictured left: The Cregagh Estate honoured George Best by unveilling a mural on what would have been his 60th birthday).
The 1966-67 season was again successful, as Manchester United claimed the league title by four points. The following season, Best became a European Cup winner after scoring in the final against Benfica. United won 4-1 and Best was later crowned European Footballer of the Year and Football Writers' Association Player of the Year. After this, his steady decline began.
Best opened two nightclubs in Manchester, in the late 1960s, Oscar's and the other called Slack Alice's (which later became 42nd Street Nightclub). He also owned fashion boutiques, in partnership with Mike Summerbee of Manchester City. However, he developed problems with gambling, womanising and alcoholism.
Best played at United when shirt numbers were assigned to positions, in the traditional English way, and not the player. When Best played at right wing, as he famously did during the later stages of the 1966 and 1968 European Cups, he donned the number 7. As a left winger, where he played exclusively in his debut season and nearly all of the 1971-72, he wore the number 11. Best wore the number 8 shirt at inside right on occasion throughout the 1960s, but for more than half of his matches during 1970-71. He was playing at inside left (wearing the number 10) in 1972 when he famously walked out on United the first time but was back in the number 11 for the autumn of 1973 before leaving for good. Best even wore the number 9 jersey once for United, with Bobby Charlton injured, on 22 March 1969 at Old Trafford, scoring the only goal in a 1-0 win over Sheffield wednesday..
In 1974, aged 27, Best quit United for good. His last competitive game for the club was on 1 January 1974 against Queens Park Rangers at Loftus Road. In total Best made 470 appearances for Manchester United in all competitions from 1963 to 1974, and scored 179 goals (including six in one game against fourth division Northampton Town). He was the club's top scorer for six consecutive seasons, and was the First Division's top scorer in the 1967-68 season. Over the next decade he went into an increasingly rapid decline, drifting between several clubs, including spells in South Africa, Ireland, America, Scotland, and Australia.

Jewish Guild (1974)
Playing only five competitive matches for Jewish Guild in South Africa, Best endured criticism for missing several training sessions. During his short time there, he was the main draw attracting thousands of spectators to the matches.
Fulham (1976-1977)
Best had a brief resurgence in form with Fulham in 1976-77, showing that, although he had lost some of his pace, he retained his skills. His time with the Cottagers is particularly remembered for an FA Cup game against second division outfit Hereford United in which he tackled his former teammate, and old drinking mate, Rodney Marsh. Best stated later in life that he enjoyed his time most while at Fulham, despite not winning any honours.
United States (1976-79)
Best played for three clubs in the United States: Los Angeles Aztecs, Fort Laurderdale Strikers and later San Jose Earthquakes; he also played for the Detroit Express on a European tour. Best revelled in the anonymity America afforded him after England and was a success on the field, too, scoring 15 goals in 24 games in his first season with the Aztecs and named as the NASL's best midfielder in his second. He and manager Ken Adam opened "Bestie's Beach Club" (now called "The Underground" after the London subway system) in Hermosa Beach, California in the 1970s, and continued to operate it until the 1990s.
Hibernian (1979-81)
Best caused a stir in when he returned to the UK to play for Scottish club Hibernian. Hibs, who were suffering a decline in fortunes and were heading for relegation from the Premier Division, signed Best on a "pay per play" basis after the club chairman, Tom Hart, received a tip-off from an Edinburgh Evening News reporter that he was available. Even though Best failed to save Hibs from relegation, gates increased dramatically, as Hibs' attendance quadrupled for his first match at Easter Road. One infamous incident saw Best initially sacked by Hibs after he went on a massive drinking session with the French rugby team, who were in Edinburgh to play Scotland. He was brought back a week later.
Best returned to the USA to play for San Jose Earthquakes in what was officially described as a 'loan', though he only managed a handful of appearances for Hibs in the First Division in the following season. He returned one last time to Easter Road in 1984, for jackie McNamara's testimonial match against Newcastle. In his third season in the States, Best scored only once in 12 appearances. His moves to Fort Lauderdale and San Jose were also unhappy, as his off-field demons began to take control of his life again. After failing to agree terms with Bolton Wanderers in 1981, he was invited as a guest player and played three matches for two Hong Kong First Division teams (Sea Bees and Rangers) in 1982.
Bournemouth (1982-1983)
In late 1982, Bournemouth manager Don Megson signed the 36-year-old Best for the Football League Third Division side, and he remained there until the end of the season, when he finally retired from football at the age of 37. The following season Malcolm Allison apparently persuaded him to sign for Middlesborough but he never made a League appearance for them.
Brisbane Lions (1983-1984)
Best played in a friendly for Newry Town F.C. against Shamrock Rovers F.C.. in August 1983 before ending his professional career exactly 20 years after joining Manchester United with a brief four match stint playing for the Brisbane Lions in the Australian national Soccer League during the 1983/84 season.
Testimonial (1988)
On 8 August 1988, a testimonial match was held for Best at Windsor Park. Among the crowd were Sir Matt Busby and Bob Bishop, the scout who discovered Best, while those playing included Ossie Ardiles, Pat Jennings and Liam Brady. Best scored twice, one goal from outside the box, the other from the penalty spot.

International career
He was capped 37 times for Northern Ireland, scoring nine goals. Of his nine international goals four were scored against Cyprus and one each against Albania, England, Scotland, Switzerland and Turkey.
On 15 May 1971, Best scored possibly the most famous "goal" of his career at Windsor Park in Belfastt against England. As Gordon Banks, the English goalkeeper, released the ball in the air in order to kick the ball downfield, Best managed to kick the ball first, which sent the ball high over their heads and heading towards the open goal. Best outpaced Banks and headed the ball into the empty goal, but the goal was disallowed by referee Alistair Mackenzie.
Best continued to be selected for Northern Ireland throughout the 1970s, despite his fluctuating form and off pitch problems. There were still glimpses of his genius; in 1976, Northern Ireland were drawn against Holland in Rotterdam as one of their group qualifying matches for the 1978 FIFA World Cup. Holland - midway between successive World Cup final appearances - and Johan Cruyff were at their peak at the time. Five minutes into the game Best received the ball wide on the left. Instead of heading towards goal he turned directly infield, weaved his way past at least three Dutchmen and found his way to Cruyff who was wide right. Best took the ball to his opponent, dipped a shoulder twice and slipped it between Cruyff's feet - nutmegging arguably the best player in the world at that time.
Best was considered briefly by manager Billy BIngham for the 1982 World Cup. However, at 36 and with his football skills dulled by age and drink, he was not selected in the Northern Ireland squad.

India - Culture And Heritage

2010-04-07T00:05:00.004+01:00

Culture of India
A Kathakali performer as Krishna. One the eight major Indian classical dances, Kathakali is more than 1,500 years old and its theme is heavily influenced by the Puranas. (Pictured right: Akshardham in Delhi the largest Hindu temple in the world).
The culture of India has been shaped not only by its long history, unique geography and diverse demography, but also by its ancient heritages, which were formed during the Indus Valley Civalization and evolved further during the Vedic age, rise and decline of Buddhism, the Golden age, invasions from Central Asia, European colonization and the rise of Indian nationalism.
India's diversity is visible in its languages, religions, dance, music, architecture and customs which differ from place to place within the country, but nevertheless possess a commonality. The culture of India is an amalgamation of diverse sub-cultures spread all over the country and traditions that are several millennia old.

Religion
India is the birth place of Dharmic relig such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Dharmic religions, also known as Indian religions, are a major form of world religions next to the Abrahamic ones. Today, Hinduism and Buddhism are the world's third- and fourth-largest religions respectively, with around 1.4 billion followers altogether.
India is one of the most religiously diverse nations in the world, with some of the most deeply religious societies and cultures. Religion still plays a central and definitive role in the life of most of its people.
The religion of 80% of the people is Hinduism. Islam is practiced by around 13% of all Indians. Sikhism, Jainism and especially Buddhism are influential not only in India but across the world. Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism and the Bah'i Faith are also influential but their numbers are smaller. Despite the strong role of religion in Indian life, atheism and agnostics also have visible influence along with a self-ascribed tolerance to other people.

Family
Family plays a big role in the indian culture. India for ages has had a prevailing tradition of the joint family system. It’s a system under which even extended members of a family like one’s parents, children, the children’s spouses and their offspring, etc. live together. The elder-most, usually the male member is the head in the joint Indian family system who makes all important decisions and rules, whereas other family members abide by it.
Arranged marriages have the tradition in Indian society for centuries. Even today, overwhelming majority of Indians have their marriages planned by their parents and other respected family-members, with the consent of the bride and groom. Arranged matches were made after taking into account factors such as age, height, personal values and tastes, the backgrounds of their families (wealth, social standing) and their castes and the astrological compatibility of the couples' horoscopes.
In India, the marriage is thought to be for life, and the divorce rate is extremely low — 1.1% compared with about 50% in the United States. The arranged marriages generally have a much lower divorce rate. The divorce rates have risen significantly in recent years:
"Opinion is divided over what the phenomenon means: for traditionalists the rising numbers portend the breakdown of society while, for some modernists, they speak of a healthy new empowerment for women."
Although child marriage was outlawed in 1860, it is continued to be practiced in some rural parts of India. According to UNICEF’s “State of the World’s Children-2009” report, 47% of India's women aged 20–24 were married before the legal age of 18, with 56% in rural areas. The report also showed that 40% of the world's child marriages occur in India.
Indian names are based on a variety of systems and naming conventions, which vary from region to region. Names are also influenced by religion and caste and may come from religion or epics. India's population speaks a wide variety of languages.
Although women and men are equal before the law and the trend toward gender equality has been noticeable, women and men still occupy distinct functions in Indian society.Woman's role in the society is often to perform household works and pro bono community work. This low rate of participation has ideological and historical reasons. Women and women's issues appear only 7-14% of the time in news programs. In most Indian families, women do not own any property in their own names, and do not get a share of parental property. Due to weak enforcement of laws protecting them, women continue to have little access to land and property. In many families, especially rural ones, the girls and women face nutritional discrimination within the family, and are anaemic and malnourished. They still lag behind men in terms of income and job status. Traditional Hindu art, such as Rangoli (or Kolam), is very popular among Indian women. Popular and influential woman's magazines include Femina, Grishobha and Woman's Era.

Animals
The varied and rich wildlife of India has had a profound impact on the region's popular culture. Common name for wilderness in India is Jungle which was adopted by the British colonialists to the English language. The word has been also made famous in The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. India's wildlife has been the subject of numerous other tales and fables such as the Panchatantra and the Jataka tales.
In Hinduism, the cow is regarded as a symbol of ahimsa (non-violence), mother goddess and bringer of good fortune and wealth. For this reason, cows are revered in Hindu culture and feeding a cow is that is seen as an act of worship.

Music
The music of India includes multiples varieties of religious, folk, popular, pop, and classical music. The oldest preserved examples of Indian music are the melodies of the Samaveda that are still sung in certain Vedic Srauta sacrifices. India's classical music tradition is heavily influenced by Hindu texts. It includes two distinct styles: Carnatic and Hindustani music. It is noted for the use of several Raga, melodic modes. it has a history spanning millennia and it was developed over several eras. It remains instrumental to the religious inspiration, cultural expression and pure entertainment.
Purandaradasa is considered the "father of carnatic music" (Karnataka sangeeta pitamaha). He concluded his songs with a salutation to Lord Purandara Vittala and is believed to have composed as many as 475,000 songs in the Kannada language. However, only about 1000 are known today.

Cuisine
The multiple families of Indian cuisine are characterized by their sophisticated and subtle use of many spices and herbs. Each family of this cuisine is characterized by a wide assortment of dishes and cooking techniques. Though a significant portion of Indian food is vegitarian, many traditional Indian dishes also include chicken, goat, lamb, fish, and other meats.
Food is an important part of Indian culture, playing a role in everyday life as well as in festivals. Indian cuisine varies from region to region, reflecting the varied demographics of the ethnically diverse subcontinent. Generally, Indian cuisine can be split into five categories: North, South, East,West Indian and North-eastern India.
Despite this diversity, some unifying threads emerge. Varied uses of spices are an integral part of food preparation, and are used to enhance the flavor of a dish and create unique flavors and aromas. Cuisine across India has also been influenced by various cultural groups that entered India throughout history, such as the Persians, Mughals, and European colonists. Though the tandoor originated in Central Asia, Indian tandoori dishes, such as chicken tikka made with Indian ingredients, enjoy widespread popularity.
Indian cuisine is one of the most popular cuisines across the globe. Historically, Indian spices and herbs were one of the most sought after trade commodities. The spice trade between India and Europe led to the rise and dominance of Arab traders to such an extent that European explorers, such as Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus, set out to find new trade routes with India leading to the Age of dicovery. The popularity of curry, which originated in India, across Asia has often led to the dish being labeled as the "pan-Asian" dish.

Clothing

Traditional Indian clothing for women are the saris and also Ghaghra Cholis (Lehengas). For men, traditional clothes are the Dhoti/pancha/veshti or Kurta. Delhi is considered to be India's fashion capital, housing the annual Fashion weeks. In some village parts of India, traditional clothing mostly will be worn.Delhi Mumbai Chennai, Ahmedabad, and Pune are all places for people who like to shop. In southern India the men wear long, white sheets of cloth called dhoti in English and in Tamil. Over the dhoti, men wear shirts, t-shirts, or anything else. Women wear a sarii, a long sheet of colourful cloth with patterns. This is draped over a simple or fancy blouse. This is worn by young ladies and woman. Little girls wear a pavada. A pavada is a long skirt worn under a blouse. Both are often gaily patterned. Bindi is part of the women's make-up. Traditionally, the red bindi (or sindhur) was worn only by the married Hindu women, but now it has become a part of women's fashion. A bindi is also worn by some as their third eye. It sees what the others eyes can't and protect your brain from the outside and the sun. Indo-western clothing is the fusion of Western and Subcontinental fashion. Chuidar, Dupatta, Gamchha, Kurta, Mundum Neriyathum, Sherwani, uttariya are among.

Cinema
Bollywood is the informal name given to the popular Mumbai-based film industry in India. Bollywood and the other major cinematic hubs (in Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Punjabi and Telugu) constitute the broader Indian film industry, whose output is considered to be the largest in the world in terms of number of films produced and number of tickets sold. (Pictured right: Shooting of a Bollywood dance number).
India has produced many critically acclaimed cinema-makers like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Garu Dutt, K. Vishwanath, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Girish Kasaravalli, Shekhar Kapoor, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Shankar Nag, Girish Karnad, G. V. Iyer, etc. ). With the opening up of the economy in the recent years and consequent exposure to world cinema, audience tastes have been changing. In addition, multiplexes have mushroomed in most cities, changing the revenue patterns.

Buckling At The Knees

2010-04-07T00:04:00.002+01:00

He was distinctly told not to look up!

Chinese Proverbs

2010-04-07T00:03:00.004+01:00

This is a collection of Chinese proverbs (諺語 yànyŭ) and idioms (成語 chéngyŭ), given in and sorted by their pinyin transcription. Chinese proverbs and four-plus character idioms are developed from the formulaic or social dialect/saying/expression (歇後語 in pinyin: xièhòuyŭ) and historical story in Chinese.
Some proverbs are literary; that is, from a written source. (See the historical written language or the more modern written language.) Others originated among families, street vendors, and other commoners--all walks of life.

滴(dī)水(shǔi)之(zhī)恩(ēn)当(dāng)以(yǐ)涌(yǒng)泉(quán)相(xiāng)报(bào)
Literally: A drop of water shall be returned with a burst of spring.
Meaning: Even if it was just a little help from others, you should return the favor with all you can when others are in need.

一(yī)人(rén)吃(chī)饱(bǎo)，全(quán)家(jiā)不(bù)饥(jī)
Literally: If a single member of a family eats, the whole family will not feel hungry.
Meaning: If there is one person in the family who is able to provide food for themselves, it should fall upon them to take care of the rest of their family too.
Common Misunderstanding: If one person in the family is happy, the whole family is happy.

福(fú)無(wú)重(chóng)至(zhì), 禍(huò)不(bú)單(dān)行(xíng)
Literally: A person is blessed once, but his troubles never come alone.
Meaning: There are never enough blessings, but there are too many troubles.

冰(bīng)冻(dòng)三(sān)尺(chǐ)，非(fēi)一(yī)日(rì)之(zhī)寒(hán)(ice+freeze+three+units(~feet),not+one+day's(7th and 8th)+chill)
Literally: A single day of sub-zero temperature is not enough to create three feet of ice.
Moral: Great things cannot be accomplished in a short period of time.
Compare: Rome was not built in a day (Roma non fu fatta in un giorno, Italian proverb).

大(dà)水(shuǐ)冲(chōng)了(le)龙(lóng)王(wáng)庙(miào)(big+water+poured over+finish+dragon+king+temple)
Literally: The Dragon-King's temple is flooded.
Moral: You can be harmed by the things you control.
Explanation: The Dragon-King is a mystical creature that lives underwater and controls the natural bodies of water. People visit the dragon-king temple to placate him and prevent floods, thus this proverb is ironic situationally (Sometimes this proverb is used as '大水冲了龙王庙，一家人不认一家人' (...yi1 jia1 ren2 bu4 ren4 yi1 jia1 ren2 ...one+home+person+not+know+one+home+person), or, One family member doesn't recognize another family member. The idiom might be used to resolve an embarrassing situation. For example, someone has a conflict with a stranger, only to find the stranger was a neighbor, or a sister's boyfriend, or any other person with some relation. The two might use this idiom to save face and make peace with each other, comparing the conflict to that of the flooded dragon-king's temple (dragon-king: rain god in some sense).

Cat Detective

2010-04-07T00:02:00.004+01:00

Don't worry. I'm On The Case!

Car Sharing

2010-04-07T00:01:00.001+01:00

Environmentalists have long been advocating car sharing as a useful way in which ordinary people can help in the fight against global warming. Take a look at how this works in practice by clicking on the video link below. Or would you prefer to take the bus?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU6RDQ4jGBo

Looking Back - Fault Cuts Short Space Shuttle Mission

2010-04-06T00:05:00.001+01:00

On this day in 1997, the US space agency, Nasa, aborted the latest space shuttle flight and ordered its crew to return to Earth because of a defective fuel cell.
Nasa officials insist that the other two fuel cells are working normally and that the spacecraft and its crew of five men and two women are in no danger.
But after a day of intensive discussion, the decision was taken to bring Columbia back early, with touchdown at 1434 local time (1834 GMT) ,
The shuttle had been in orbit for just four days, out of a mission planned to last over two weeks.
Explosion risk
Tommy Holloway, manager of the US space shuttle programme, told a news conference the fault in the fuel cell meant the supercold liquid hydrogen and oxygen it uses to generate electricity might overheat and mix, causing a disastrous explosion.
"We have come to the conclusion that the conservative thing to do is to land the shuttle," he said. "We have learnt always to be conservative in issues of research."
There are three electricity generating units on board Columbia, providing the power to conduct planned experiments and also to make drinking water for the crew.
Each of them is made up of 96 cells, arranged in three 32-cell "substacks".
Almost immediately after lift-off on Friday, engineers noticed lower than expected power from one of the substacks in unit two.
Safety 'might be jeopardised'
The unit continued to weaken during the next 18 hours of the flight. It was feared that allowing it to continue deteriorating would seriously jeopardise the safety of those aboard.
Nasa is still haunted by the Challenger disaster more than 10 years ago, when the space shuttle exploded just after lift-off. All seven crew members died.
The Columbia crew was to have carried out an ambitious program of research. It included lighting controlled fires in space to see the effect of zero gravity on flame.
The shuttle also carried a greenhouse unit for plants to study the effect of weightlessness on growth.
The Columbia space shuttle is the oldest of the four shuttles in the fleet.
It has had problems with fuel cells before, causing an earlier mission in 1981 - only the second Nasa shuttle mission - to be cut short.
There has been only one other aborted shuttle mission, in 1991, when a navigation device developed a fault.

The aborted flight was relaunched on 1 July 1997 with the same crew of seven on board Columbia. This time the mission was carried out in full, landing on 17 July without mishap.
Columbia continued carrying out shuttle missions without a problem until February 2003, when disaster struck.
Right at the end of a routine mission, just as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere 16 minutes before its scheduled landing, Columbia disintegrated, killing all seven astronauts on board.
An independent investigation confirmed initial suspicions that a piece of insulating foam from an external fuel tank which hit the shuttle's left wing as it took off was to blame.
The foam had damaged the shuttle's heat shield, causing it to break up on re-entry.
Shuttle flights have since been suspended. Nasa has set a target date to resume shuttle missions in May 2005, with stringent new safety procedures in place.
Discussions continue over how to replace the ageing fleet of space shuttles when they reach the end of their original design life in 2010.

A Matter Of Convenience

2010-04-06T00:04:00.002+01:00

Especially for men who dribble!

Pineberries

2010-04-06T00:03:00.005+01:00

An interesting article appeared on SkyNews last Thursday, regarding Pineberries (I must admit I had never heard of them) but despite being called 'freaky fruit' they do sound quite exotic, but a litttle expensive.

What looks like a strawberry, but is white and tastes like a pineapple? A pineberry, of course.

The freaky fruit is going on sale at selected Waitrose stores.
While the delicacy might look like a faded strawberry, it is said to have the exotic flavour and smell of a pineapple.
If the pineberry tantalises your tastebuds, you best be quick - they are only in season for the next five weeks.
The fruit, which has the same genetic make-up as the common strawberry, originated in South America where it grew wild.
It had been near to extinction until seven years ago when Dutch farmers saved it.
Now it is grown commercially in glasshouses, turning from green to white and is ripe when the seeds turn dark red.
Waitrose fruit buyer Nicki Baggott said: "Pineberries offer our customers the chance to add a new fruit into their diet and the berry's bright appearance can add an unusual decoration to sweet dishes.
"As the summer unfolds we won't be surprised to hear that our customers are inviting their friends over for pineberry pavlovas, punch or serving them up with yogurt for a lighter alternative."
:: A 125g punnet of pineberries will sell for £2.99 until April 13, and afterwards for £3.99.

Golf Can Sometimes Be A Very Dangerous Game

2010-04-06T00:02:00.001+01:00

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud

2010-04-06T00:01:00.001+01:00

"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (also commonly known as "Daffodils" or "The Daffodils") is a poem by William Wordsworth (pictured).
It was inspired by an April 15, 1802 event in which Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, came across a "long belt" of daffodils. Written in 1804, it was first published in 1807 in Poems In Two Volumes, and a revised version was released in 1815, which is more commonly known. It consists of four six-line stanzas, in iambic tetrameter and an ABABCC rhyme scheme.
It is usually considered Wordsworth's most famous work. In the "Nation's Favourite Poems", a poll carried out by the BBC's Bookworm, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" came fifth. Well known, and often anthologised, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is commonly seen as a classic of English romanticism within poetry, although the original version was poorly reviewed by Wordsworth's contemporaries.

Background
The inspiration for the poem may have been a walk he took with his sister Dorothy around Glendale, near their house in the Lake District. It may also have been nearby Glencoyne Bay. Wordsworth would draw on this to compose "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" in 1804. Dorothy later wrote in reference to this walk:

When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway. We rested again and again. The Bays were stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances and in the middle of the water like the sea.
– Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal , Thursday, 15 April 1802

The death of his brother, John, in 1805 had affected William strongly. However, the effect of his sister Dorothy was positive, and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is considered an example of the benefit of her presence. In this respect, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is like "Alice Fell", "The Beggars" and "The Butterfly". At the time of the poem, Wordsworth lived with his wife and sister at Dove Cottage, in Grasmere in England's Lake District. Life had returned to some normally for Wordsworth.
Lyrical Ballads, a series of poems by both himself and Samuel Taylor Colleridge, had been first published in 1798 and had started the romantic movement in England. It had brought Wordsworth and the other Lake poets into the poetic limelight. Wordsworth had published nothing new since the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, and a new publication was eagerly awaited. Wordsworth had, however, gained some financial security by the 1805 publication of the fourth edition of Lyrical Ballads; it was the first from which he enjoyed the profits of copyright ownership. He decided to turn away from "The Recluse" and turn more attention to the expedient publication of Poems in Two Volumes, in which "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" would appear.

Composition and themes
The poem is 24 lines long, consisting of four six-line stanzas. Each stanza is formed by a quatrain, then a couplet, to form a sestet and a ABABCC rhyme scheme.The poem is written in iambic tetrameter. The fourth- and third-last lines were not composed by Wordsworth, but by his wife, Mary. Wordsworth considered them the best lines of the whole poem. Like most works by Wordsworth, it is romantic in nature; the beauty of nature, unkempt by humanity, and a reconciliation of man with his environment, are two of the fundamental principles of the romantic movement within poetry. The poem is littered with emotionally strong words, such as "golden", "dancing" and "bliss".
The plot of the poem is simple. Wordsworth believed it "an elementary feeling and simple expression". The speaker is riding among the clouds, viewing a belt of daffodils, next to a lake whose beauty is overshadowed:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine

and twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretched in never-ending line

along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

in such a jocund company:

I gazed - and gazed - but little thought

what wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Original version
The version published in the 1807 Poems in Two Volumes ran:

I wandered lonely as a Cloud

That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd

A host of dancing Daffodils;

Along the Lake, beneath the trees,

Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.

The waves beside them danced, but they

Outdid the sparkling waves in glee: -

A poet could not but be gay

In such a laughing company:

I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude,

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the Daffodils.

Wordsworth replaced "dancing" (4) with "golden"; "Along" (5) to "Beside"; and "Ten thousand" to "Fluttering and" to create the 1815 revision. He then added a stanza between the first and second, and altered "laughing" (10) to "jocund". The last stanza was left untouched.

UNICEF 'Put It Right' Campaign

2010-04-05T00:05:00.010+01:00

Children around the world are having their rights denied every day. UNICEF is working in 193 countries to protect these rights, making sure children's voices are heard and listened to.
UNICEF IS FUNDED ENTIRELY BY VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTIONS. WE RECEIVE NO FUNDING FROM THE UN BUDGET.

Caroline's Story
Caroline is just 10 years old. She lives with her Mum and her younger brothers and sister in a small village in Uganda, surrounded by beautiful crater lakes.
Her family used to rely on the lakes for fish and water. But the lakes are very dangerous – they contain bilharzia, a waterborne parasite, which if left untreated can lead to life-threatening illnesses.

With grateful thanks to UNICEF for their permission to reproduce this material from their official site.
If you wish to learn more about the work carried out by UNICEF click on the following link:
http://www.unicef.org.uk/

Why Do We Say That

2010-04-05T00:04:00.002+01:00

TOUCH AND GO
This probably comes from ships sailing in shallow waters where they might touch the seabed then go. If so, they were in a dangerous and uncertain situation.

TURN THE OTHER CHEEK
Jesus told his followers not to retaliate against violence. In Luke 6:29 he told them that if somebody strikes you on one cheek turn the other cheek to him as well.

LICK INTO SHAPE
In the Middle Ages people thought that bear cubs were born shapeless and their mother literally licked them into shape.

PAY ON THE NAIL
In the Middle Ages 'nails' were flat-topped columns in markets. When a buyer and a seller agreed a deal money was placed on the nail for all to see.

PASTURES NEW
In 1637 John Milton wrote a poem called Lycidas, which includes the words 'Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new'.

More On Computers

2010-04-05T00:03:00.001+01:00

The box said 'Requires Windows 95 or better. "I can't understand why it won't work on my Linux computer.

---

MACINTOSH:

Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs

---

RAM disk is 'not' an installation procedure!

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MICROSOFT = Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers

A Matter Of Convenience

2010-04-05T00:02:00.001+01:00

Thought For Today

2010-04-05T00:01:00.001+01:00

Arguments are to be avoided they are always vulgar and often convincing.
Oscar Wilde

UNICEF 'Put It Right' Campaign

2010-04-04T00:05:00.010+01:00

Children around the world are having their rights denied every day. UNICEF is working in 193 countries to protect these rights, making sure children's voices are heard and listened to.
UNICEF IS FUNDED ENTIRELY BY VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTIONS. WE RECEIVE NO FUNDING FROM THE UN BUDGET.

Sally's Story
Sally, 3, lives on the streets of Manila, capital of the Philippines, with her mother, stepfather and four siblings.
Street children like Sally are denied the right to a childhood, education and health care.
Right now, Sally’s prospects are bleak. Sally’s mother is herself a former street child. Her stepfather drives a motorbike taxi, earning around £1.60 a day. It’s not enough to get the family off the streets.

With grateful thanks to UNICEF for their permission to reproduce this material from their official site.
If you wish to learn more about the work carried out by UNICEF click on the the following link:
http://www.unicef.org.uk/

Funny Signs

2010-04-04T00:04:00.004+01:00

They say it's damn good!

Homer Simpson Wisdom

2010-04-04T00:03:00.001+01:00

Son, when you participate in sporting events - it's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get.

---

Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen.

---

Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!

---

I'm trying to fix your mother's camera. Easy, easy - Hmm. I think I need a bigger drill.

---

You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is 'never try'.

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Oh, everything's too damned expensive these days. Like this Bible. It cost 15 bucks! And talk about a preachy book! Everybody's a sinner! except this guy.

Always Take The Elevator

2010-04-04T00:02:00.001+01:00

Are they really serious about this?

Brainteaser - Saturday's Answer

2010-04-04T00:01:00.004+01:00

Yesterday we set ten 'Trivia' questions for you to answer. Check the answers below to see how you got on.

01 Plaster of Paris
02 He was an Italian mathematician and astronomer
03 33 r.p.m.
04 Cuba
05 In 1966
06 France.
07 The Printing Press
08 Austrian
09 Watership Down
10 Sahara

9/10 Excellent 7/8 Very Good 5/6 Good - Below 5 You should have payed more attention at school!

UNICEF 'Put It Right' Campaign

2010-04-03T00:05:00.007+01:00

Charles's Story
Charles, only thirteen years old, has had to grow up very quickly.
Last year, his mother discovered that she had HIV. She was pregnant with Charles’s baby sister, Kaseo, at the time. Shortly after she had the baby, Charles’s mother caught TB. Her body was unable to fight the infection and she died.

With grateful thanks to UNICEF for their permission to reproduce this material from their official site.

If you wish to learn more about the work carried out by UNICEF click on the following link:

http://www.unicef.org.uk/

You Can't Survive On One Day's Work A Year

2010-04-03T00:04:00.001+01:00

I wonder if his backing group are called

the elves!

Computer Definitions

2010-04-03T00:03:00.002+01:00

MEGAHERTZ
How your head feels after 17 beers.

MODEM
What ya did when the weeds grew to tall.

MOUSE PAD
Where Mickey and Minnie live.

NETWORK
Scoop'n up a big fish before it breaks the line.

ONLINE
Where to stay when taking the sobriety test.

Someone Always Has To Spoil It

2010-04-03T00:02:00.001+01:00

Brainteaser

2010-04-03T00:01:00.001+01:00

Today's brainteaser is a mixed bag of 'Trivia' questions. As usual there are ten for you to answer. Good luck!

01 What material is used to make the plaster cast in which broken bones are set?
02 Who was Galileo Galilei?
03 At what speed are long playing records usually played?
04 With which country do you associate Fidel Castro?
05 When did England last win the World Cup for football?
06 With which other country did Britain build Concorde?
07 What did John Gutenburg invent in about 1455?
08 What nationality was Mozart?
09 What is the title of the novel about rabbits by Richard Adams?
10 Which is the longest desert in the world?

Answers will appear in tomorrow's Journal.

UNICEF 'Put It Right' Campaign

2010-04-02T00:05:00.020+01:00

Children around the world are having their rights denied every day. UNICEF is working in 193 countries to protect these rights, making sure childrens voices are heard and listened to.
UNICEF IS FUNDED ENTIRELY BY VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTIONS. WE RECEIVE NO FUNDING FROM THE UN BUDGET.

Sreynet's Story
Sreynet, ten, has lived on the streets in Cambodia all her life.
She lives next to a busy crossroads with her mother and two-year-old stepsister.
Each morning, Sreynet crosses the road to buy a bowl of noodle soup. She shares it with her sister, then their mother eats what’s left. After breakfast, the two girls go to the park to beg.

With grateful thanks to UNICEF for their permission to reproduce this material from their official site.
If you wish to learn more about the work carried out by UNICEF click on the following link:
http://www.unicef.org.uk/

Budget Airline Cuts Costs Further

2010-04-02T00:04:00.001+01:00

And that's the Jumbo Jet version!

Rules For Ensemble Players

2010-04-02T00:03:00.004+01:00

If you are completely lost, stop everyone and say, "I think we should tune."

---

If everyone gets lost except you, follow those who get lost.

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Markings for slurs, dynamics and ornaments should not be observed. They are only there to embellish the score.

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Take your time turning pages.

Making The Best Of A Bad Job

2010-04-02T00:02:00.001+01:00

Pool party! Everyone invited!

Who Am I? - Thursday's Answer

2010-04-02T00:01:00.001+01:00

Thursday's 'Who Am I?

answer

was

Boris Johnson

UNICEF "Put It Right" Campaign

2010-04-01T00:05:00.013+01:00

Shumon's Story
Shumon, just 13, lives in a slum in Bangladesh and works seven hours a day making pots in an aluminium factory.
Unlike other children his age, he has no time to go to school.
It is unfair that Shumon has to work and miss out on an education. But his father only earns £1.10 a day, and his family relies on Shumon’s earnings to help support him and his two younger brothers.

With grateful thanks to UNICEF for their permission to reproduce this material from their official site.
If you wish to learn more about the work carried out by UNICEF click on the following link:
http://www.unicef.org.uk/

Funny Signs

2010-04-01T00:04:00.004+01:00

That's a bit harsh!

Housing Complaints

2010-04-01T00:03:00.001+01:00

I have had the clerk of works down on the floor six times but I still have had no satisfaction.

---

I request permission to remove my drawers in the kitchen. 50% of the walls are damp, 50% have crumbling plaster and the rest are plain filthy.

---

He's got this huge tool that vibrates the whole house and I just can't take it anymore.

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What Accident?

2010-04-01T00:02:00.001+01:00

Guess who caused the accident?

Who Am I?

2010-04-01T00:01:00.001+01:00

Today we have another 'Who Am I' puzzle for you to solve. As usual ten clues that should lead you to the identity of our mystery celebrity. Good luck!

01 I was born on 19 June 1964.
02 My place of birth was New York City.
03 My father was a former member of the European Parliament.
04 My mother was the painter Charlotte Fawcett (later Wahl).
05 As a child I suffered from severe deafness.
06 I was educated at the Europen School in Brussels, Ashdown House School and at Eton College.
07 I read classics at Balliol College, Oxford.
08 I was elected President of the Oxford Union.
09 I was once the editor of the 'Spectator'.
10 I was once elected as the Member of Parliament for Henley.

Do you know who our mystery celebrity is? Answer in tomorrows Journal.

UNICEF "Put It Right" Campaign - Aklima's Story

2010-03-31T00:05:00.010+01:00

Aklima's Story
Aklima, aged 12, lives in Dhaka in Bangladesh with her parents, four sisters and two brothers. Her family is very poor.
Aklima doesn’t spend her days in a classroom like other children her age.
Instead, she makes a living by scavenging for bits of plastic and scraps of paper at a rubbish dump.

Dangerous work
Every morning, Aklima makes the hour-long walk to the dump with her friends. They chat and laugh together throughout the day, but the work can be dangerous.
“Sometimes I cut my hands and legs on broken glass or tins.”
It’s wrong that Aklima has to work. Because she works, she has not been able to go to a normal primary school.

Denied an education
Around the world, approximately 100 million children - the majority of them girls - are still denied their right to go to school.
Without an education, it is almost impossible for children like Aklima to get out of the poverty that forces them to work in dangerous, unpleasant conditions.
“I don’t want to do this work.”

Poverty and other barriers
Poverty and pressure to work are not the only things keeping children out of the classroom.
Lack of facilities, war, and discrimination against girls and minority groups deny other children the chance to learn.
Yet every child, wherever they are, has the right to free primary education.

UNICEF works to put it right
A few months ago, a social worker introduced Aklima to an informal, open-air school near the rubbish dump. The school is run by a local organisation in partnership with UNICEF.
Although Aklima still has to work in the morning, she can now go to school in the afternoon.
“It’s good to go to school.”

A love of learning
Aklima is thrilled to have the opportunity to learn. She enjoys being with all the other children and her favourite subject is maths.
“We study. Everyone sits together. We draw pictures and write Bangla.”
UNICEF recognises that even basic, part-time education can make a world of difference for children like Aklima – and their children in turn.

Essential supplies
UNICEF works to ensure that all children have the chance to go to school.
We help to put essential supplies such as books in place wherever children need them. We work with families, communities and governments to tackle child labour.
We partner with local organisations to reach out to children like Aklima.

You can help
Aklima now has the chance to go to school, but millions of children around the world still can’t get any education.
UNICEF is funded entirely by voluntary contributions. We need your help to ensure that every child has the chance to learn - and so develop to their full potential.
Denying a child’s right to education is wrong. Help us put it right for children like Aklima.

With grateful thanks to UNICEF for their permission to reproduce this material from their official site.

If you wish to learn more about the work carried out by UNICEF click on the following link:

http://www.unicef.org.uk/

Horsepower

2010-03-31T00:04:00.001+01:00

Eva Braun

2010-03-31T00:03:00.003+01:00

Eva Anna Paula Braun, died Eva Anna Paula Hitler (6 February 1912 – 30 April 1945) was the longtime companion and, for a brief time, wife, of Adolph Hitler. Braun met Hitler in Munich when she was 17 years old while working as an assistant and model for his personal photographer and began seeing him often about two years later. She attempted suicide twice during their early relationship. By 1936 she was a part of his household at the Berghof near Berchtesgaden and by all accounts lived a materially luxurious and sheltered life throughout World war II. Her political sway on Hitler is unknown, but the consensus among historians is that this was likely little to none Braun kept up habits which met Hitler's disapproval, such as smoking, wearing makeup and nude sunbathing. Braun enjoyed photography and many of the surviving colour photographs of Hitler were taken by her. She was a key figure within Hitler's inner social circle, but did not attend public events with him until the summer of 1944, when her sister married an officer on his personal staff.
As the Third Reich collapsed towards the end of the war, Braun swore her loyalty to Hitler and went to Berlin to be by his side in the heavily reinforced Fuhrerbunker deep beneath the Reich chancellery. As Red Army troops fought their way into the neighbourhood on 29 April 1945, she married Hitler during a brief civil ceremony: she was 33 and he 56. Less than 40 hours later they comitted suicide together in a sitting room of the bunker, she by biting into a capsule of cyanide. The German public was wholly unaware of Braun until after her death.

Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler with Blondi at the Berghof in either 1940 or 1942.

Background
Born in Munich, Eva Braun was the second daughter of school teacher Friedrich "Fritz" Braun and Franziska "Fanny" Kronberger, who both came from respectable Bavarian Catholic families. Her elder sister Ilse was born in 1909 and her younger sister Margarete "Gretl" was born in 1915. Braun was educated at a lyceum, then for one year at a business school in a convent where she had average grades and a talent for athletics. She worked for several months as a receptionist at a medical office, then at age 17 took a job as an office and lab assistant and photographer's model for Heinrich Hoffmann, the official photographer for the Nazi Party. She met Hitler, 23 years her senior, at Hoffmann's studio of Munich in October 1929. He had been introduced to her as "Herr Wolff" (a childhood nickname he used during the 1920s for security purposes). She described him to friends as a "gentleman of a certain age with a funny moustache, a light-coloured English overcoat, and carrying a big felt hat." He appreciated her eye colour, which was said to be close to his mother's. Her family was strongly against the relationship and little is known about it during the first two years.

Relationship and turmoil
Hitler saw more of Braun after the apparent 1931 suicide of his half sister Angela's daughter Geli Raubal with whom, it was rumoured, he had been intimate. The circumstances of Raubal's death in Munich have never been confirmed. Some historians suggest she killed herself because she was distraught over her relationship with Hitler or his relationship with Braun, while others have speculated Hitler played a more direct role in the death of his niece. Braun was unaware that Raubal was a rival for Hitler's affections until after Raubal's death. Meanwhile, Hitler was seeing other women, such as actress Renate Muller, whose early death may also have been suicide.
Eva Braun first attempted suicide on 1 November 1932 at the age of 20 by shooting herself in the chest with her father's pistol. She attempted suicide a second time on 28 May 1935 by taking an overdose of Phanodorm (sleeping pills). After Braun's recovery, Hitler became more committed to her and arranged for the substantial royalties from widely published and popular photographs of him taken by Hoffmann's photo studio to pay for a villa in Munich. This income also provided her with a Mercedes, a chauffeur and a maid. Braun's sister Gretl moved in with her. Hoffmann later asserted Braun became a fixture in Hitler's life by attempting suicide less than a year after Geli Raubal's death, as Hitler wished to avoid any further scandal.
When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Braun sat on the stage in the area reserved for VIPs as a secretary, to which Hitler's sister Angela strongly objected, along with the wives of other ministers. She was banned from living anywhere near Braun as a result. By 1936 Braun was at Hitler's household at the Berghof near Berchtesgaden whenever he was in residence there and her parents were also invited for dinner several times. In 1938 Hitler named Braun his primary heir, to receive about 600 pounds yearly after his death. Nonetheless, Braun's political influence on Hitler was apparently minimal. She was never allowed to stay in the room when business or political conversations took place. However, some historians have inferred she was aware of at least some sordid details concerning the Third Reich's inner workings. It is not certain whether Braun was a member of the Nazi party. According to biographer Angela Lambert Braun was neither a member nor ever pressured to join. By all accounts she led a sheltered and privileged existence and seemed uninterested in politics. The only known instance in which she took any interest in policy and politics was in 1943, shortly after Germany had fully transitioned to a total war economy. Among other things, the transition meant a potential ban on women's cosmetics and luxuries (as was already the case in the Allied countries). According to Albert Speer's memoir, Inside the Third Reich, Braun immediately approached Hitler in "high indignation", to which an "uncertain" Hitler instructed Speer to simply and quietly cease production of women's cosmetics and luxuries rather than an outright ban.
Hitler and Braun never appeared as a couple in public and there is some indication that this, along with their not having married early in their relationship, was due to Hitler's fear that he would lose popularity among female supporters. The German people were wholly unaware of Braun's relationship with Hitler until after the war. According to Speer's memoirs, Braun never slept in the same room as Hitler and had her own rooms at the Berghof, in Hitler's Berlin residence and in the Berlin bunker. Speer also wrote:
"Eva Braun was allowed to be present during visits from old party associates. She was banished as soon as other dignitaries of the Reich, such as cabinet ministers, appeared at the table ... Hitler obviously regarded her as socially acceptable only within strict limits. Sometimes I kept her company in her exile, a room next to Hitler's bedroom. She was so intimidated that she did not dare leave the house for a walk. Out of sympathy for her predicament I soon began to feel a liking for this unhappy woman, who was so deeply attached to Hitler."
Speer later said, "Eva Braun will prove a great disappointment to historians."

Lifestyle
Even during World War II Braun apparently lived a life of leisure, spending her time exercising, reading romance novels, watching films and early German television (at least until around 1943) along with later helping to host gatherings of Hitler's inner circle. She reportedly accepted gifts which were stolen property belonging to deposed European royal families.
Traudl Junge, Hitler's youngest secretary, wrote in her memoirs Until The Final Hour:
"She was very well dressed and groomed, and I noticed her natural unaffected manner. She wasn't the kind of ideal German girl you saw on recruiting posters for the BDM or in woman's magazines. Her carefully done hair was bleached, and her pretty face was made up - quite heavily but in very good taste. Eva Braun wasn't tall but she had a very pretty figure and a distinguished appearance. She knew just how to dress in a style that suited her and never looked as if she had overdone it — she always seemed appropriately and tastefully dressed, although she wore valuable jewelry. ...Eva wasn't allowed to change her hair style. Once she appeared with her hair tinted slightly darker and on one occasion she piled it up on the top of her head. Hitler was horrified: 'you look totally strange, quite changed. You are an entirely different woman!' ...and Eva Braun made haste to revert to the way she looked before."
Unlike most other Germans she was reportedly free to read European and American magazines and watch foreign films. Her affection for nude sunbathing (and being photographed at it) is known to have infuriated Hitler. Braun had a lifelong interest in photography and their closest friends called her the Rolleiflex Girl (after the well-known camera model). She did her own darkroom processing of silver (black and white) stills and most of the extant colour stills and movies of Hitler are her work.
Otto Gunsche and Heinz Linge, during extensive debriefings by Soviet intelligence officials after the war, said Braun was at the centre of Hitler's life for most of his 12 years in power. It was said that in 1936,
"He was always accompanied by her. As soon as he heard the voice of his lover he became jollier. He would make jokes about her new hats. He would take her for hours on end into his study where there would be champagne cooling in ice, chocolates, cognac, and fruit."
The interrogation report adds that when Hitler was too busy for her, "Eva would often be in tears." Speer remarked that she had told him, in the middle of 1943, that Hitler was often too busy, immersed, or tired to have sex with her.
Linge said that before the war, Hitler ordered an increase of the police guard at Braun's house in Munich after she reported to the Gestapo that a woman had said to her face she was the "Fuhrer-whore". He also stated in his memoirs that Hitler and Eva had two bedrooms and two bathrooms with interconnecting doors at the Berghof and Hitler would end most evenings alone with her in his study drinking tea.
Hitler is known to have been opposed to women wearing cosmetics (in part because they were made from animal by-products and he was a vegetarian and sometimes brought the subject up at mealtime. Linge (who was his valet) said Hitler once laughed at traces of Braun's lipstick on a napkin and to tease her, joked, "Soon we will have replacement lipstick made from dead bodies of soldiers".
Braun was very fond of her two Scottish Terrier dogs named Negus and Stasi (this dog is labeled "Katuschka" in Eva Braun's photo albums and they feature in her home movies. She usually kept them away from Hitler's German Shepherd "Blondie".
In 1944, Braun invited her cousin Gertraud Weisker to visit her at the Berghof near Berchtasgaden. Decades later, Weisker recalled that although women in the Third Reich were expected not to wear make-up, drink, or smoke, Braun did all of these things. "She was the unhappiest woman I have ever met," said Weisker, who informed Braun about how poorly the war was going for Germany, having illegally listened to BBC news broadcasts in German.
On 3 June 1944 Eva Braun's younger sister Gretl married Hermann Fegelein, who served as Heinrich Himmler's liaison on Hitler's staff. Hitler used the marriage as an excuse to allow Braun to appear at official functions. When Fegelein was caught in the closing days of the war trying to escape to Sweden with another woman, Hitler personally ordered his execution. Gretl was nine months pregnant with a daughter at this time and after the war named the child Eva Barbara Fegelein in remembrance of her sister (Eva Fegelein committed suicide in 1975]
After learning about the failed 20 July plot to kill Hitler, Braun wrote to him, "From our first meeting I swore to follow you anywhere even unto death. I live only for your love."
Marriage and suicide
In early April 1945 Braun travelled by car from Munich to Berlin to be with Hitler at the Fuhrerbunker. She refused to leave as the Red Army closed in, insisting she was one of the few people loyal to him left in the world. Hitler and Braun were married on 29 April 1945 around 00.30hrs during a brief civil ceremony which was witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. The bride wore a black (some accounts say dark blue) silk dress.
With Braun's marriage her legal name changed to Eva Hitler. When she signed her marriage certificate she wrote the letter B for her family name, then lined this out and replaced it with Hitler. Although bunker personnel were instructed to call her Frau Hitler, her new husband continued to call his wife Fraulein Braun.
There was gossip among the Führerbunker staff that she was carrying Hitler's child, but there is no evidence she was ever pregnant.
Braun and Hitler committed suicide together on 30 April 1945 at around 3:30 p.m. The occupants of the bunker heard a gunshot and the bodies were soon discovered. She had bitten onto a cyanide capsule (most historians have concluded that Hitler used a combination method, shooting himself in the right temple immediately after biting a cyanide capsule). Braun was 33 years old when she died. Their corpses were burned in the Reich Chancellery garden just outside the bunker's emergency exit.
The charred remains were found by the Russians and secretly buried at the SMERCH compound in Magdeburd, East Germany along with the bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels and their six children. All of these remains were exhumed in April 1970, completely cremated and dispersed in the Elbe river.
The rest of Braun's family survived the war, including her father, who worked in a hospital and to whom Braun sent several trunks of her belongings in April 1945. Her mother, Franziska, died at age 91 in January 1976, having lived out her days in an old farmhouse in Ruhpolding, Bavaria.

Attractive Beer Coolers

2010-03-31T00:02:00.001+01:00

Keeping abreast of refrigeration techniques!

Crimes That Led To The Guillotine (Marcel Petiot)

2010-03-31T00:01:00.001+01:00

Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot (17 January 1897 – 25 May 1946) was a French doctor and serial killer convicted of multiple murders after the discovery of the remains of 26 people in his home in Paris after World War II. He is suspected of killing more than 60 victims during his life.

Early life
Petiot was born 17 January 1897 at Auxerre, France. Later accounts make various claims of his delinquency and criminal acts during childhood and adolescence, but it is unclear whether they were invented afterwards for public consumption. It should be noted, however, that a psychiatrist diagnosed him as mentally ill on 26 March 1914, and he was expelled from school many times. He finished his education in a special academy in Paris in July 1915.
During World War I, Petiot was drafted into the French infantry in January 1916. In Aisne, he was wounded and gassed and exhibited more symptoms of mental breakdown. He was sent to various rest homes, where he was arrested for stealing army blankets and jailed in Orleans. In a psychiatric hospital at Fleury-les-Aubrais, he was again diagnosed with various mental ailments but was returned to the front in June 1918. He was transferred three weeks later after he shot himself in the foot, but was attached to a new regiment in September. A new diagnosis was enough to get him discharged with a disability pension.
Medical training
After the war, Petiot entered the accelerated education program intended for war veterans, completed medical school in eight months and went to become an intern in Evreux mental hospital. He received his medical degree in December 1921 and moved to Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, where he received payment for his services both from the patients and from government medical assistance funds. At this point, he was already using addictive narcotics. While working at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, he gained a reputation for dubious medical practices, such as supplying narcotics, and performing then-illegal abortions. Petiot's first victim might have been Louise Delaveau, the daughter of an elderly patient, with whom he had an affair in 1926. Delaveau disappeared in May and neighbours later said that they had seen Petiot load a trunk into his car. Police investigated, but eventually dismissed her as a runaway. That same year, Petiot ran for mayor of the town, hired an accomplice to disrupt a political debate with his opponent, and won. Once in office, he embezzled from the town funds. In 1927, he married Georgette Lablais. Their son Gerhardt was born the next year.
The local prefect received numerous complaints about Petiot's theft and shady financial deals. Petiot was eventually suspended as a mayor in August 1931 and resigned. The village council also resigned in sympathy. Five weeks later, on 18 October, he was elected as a councilor for the Yonne district. In 1932, he was accused of stealing electric power from the village of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne and he lost his seat in a council. Meanwhile, he had already moved to Paris.
In Paris, Petiot attracted patients with his imaginary credentials, and built an impressive reputation for his practice at 66 rue de Caumartin. However, there were rumors of illegal abortions and overt prescriptions of addictive remedies. In 1936, he was appointed médecin d'état-civil, with authority to write death certifcates. The same year, he was briefly institutionalized for kleptomania, but was released the following year. He still persisted in tax evasion.
After the outbreak of World War II and the Fall of france, Petiot begun to provide false medical certificates to French citizens who were drafted for forced labour in Germany, and treated sick workers that had returned. He was also convicted, in July 1942, of over-prescribing narcotics, despite the fact that two addicts who would have testified against him had disappeared. He was fined 2400 francs.
According to his own tall tales, Petiot also developed secret weapons that supposedly killed Germans without leaving forensic evidence, had high-level meetings with Allied commanders, engaged in resistance activities (planting booby traps all over Paris), and worked with a (nonexistent) group of anti-fascist Spaniards.
Fraudulent escape network
Petiot's most lucrative activity, however, was his own false escape route. He adopted a "code-name" "Dr. Eugène". He accepted anyone who could afford his price of 25,000 francs per person, regardless of whether they were Jews, resistance fighters, or ordinary criminals. His aides, Raoul Fourrier, Edmond Pintard, and René-Gustave Nézondet, directed victims to him. Petiot claimed that he could arrange a safe passage to Argentina or elsewhere in South America through Portugal. He also claimed that Argentine officials demanded inoculations and injected his victims with cyanide. Then he took all their valuables and disposed of the bodies. People who trusted him to deliver them to safety were never seen alive again.
At first, Petiot dumped the bodies in the Seine, but he later destroyed the bodies by submerging them in quicklime or by incinerating them. In 1941, Petiot bought a house at 21 rue le Sueur.
What Petiot failed to do was to keep a low profile. The Gestapo eventually found out about him and, by April 1943, they had heard all about his "route". Gestapo agent Robert Jodkum forced prisoner Yvan Dreyfus to approach the supposed network, but he simply vanished. A later informer successfully infiltrated the operation and the Gestapo arrested Fourrier, Pintard, and Nézondet. Under torture, they confessed that "Dr Eugène" was Marcel Petiot. Nezondet was later released but three others spent eight months in prison suspected of helping Jews to escape. Even under torture, they did not identify any other members of the resistance - because they actually knew of none. The Gestapo released the three men in January 1944.
Evasion and capture
During the intervening seven months, Petiot hid with friends, claiming that the Gestapo wanted him because he had killed Germans and informers. He eventually moved in with a patient, Georges Redouté, let his beard grow and adopted various aliases.
When the Resistance and the Paris police rose against German troops in Paris, Petiot adopted the name "Henri Valeri" and joined the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). He became a captain in charge of counterespionage and prisoner interrogations.
When the newspaper Resistance published an article about Petiot, his defense attorney from the 1942 narcotics case received a letter in which his fugitive client claimed that the published allegations were mere lies. This gave police a hint that Petiot was still in Paris. The search began anew - with "Henri Valeri" among those who were drafted to find him. Finally, on 31 October, Petiot was recognized at a Paris metro station, and arrested. Among his possessions were a pistol, 31,700 francs, and 50 sets of identity documents.
Trial and sentence
Petiot was placed on death row at La Sante prison. He continued to claim that he was innocent and that he had only killed enemies of France. He claimed that he had discovered the pile of bodies in 21 Rue le Sueur in February 1944, and assumed that they were collaborators that members of his "network" had killed.
Police noticed that Petiot had no friends in any of the major resistance groups. Some of the groups he had mentioned had never existed, and there was no proof of any of his claimed exploits. Prosecutors eventually charged him with at least 27 murders for profit. Their estimate of his loot ran to 200 million francs.
Petiot went on trial on 19 March 1946, facing 135 criminal charges. Rene Floriot acted for the defense, against a team consisting of state prosecutors and twelve civil lawyers hired by relatives of Petiot's victims. Petiot taunted the prosecuting lawyers, and claimed that various victims had been collaborators or double agents, or that vanished people were alive and well in South America under new names. He admitted to killing just nineteen of the twenty-seven victims found in his house, and claimed that they were Germans and collaborators - part of a total of 63 "enemies" killed. Floriot attempted to portray Petiot as a resistance hero, but the judges and jurors were unimpressed. Petiot was convicted of 26 counts of murder, and sentenced to death.
On 25 May, Petiot was beheaded, after a stay of a few days due to a problem in the release mechanism of the guillotine.

Looking Back - Rosenbergs Guilty Of Espionage

2010-03-30T00:05:00.023+01:00

On this day in 1951, an American electrical engineer and his wife were found guilty by New York's Federal Court of passing atomic secrets to the Russians.
Julius Rosenberg, 33, and his 35-year-old wife, Ethel, were accused of stealing technical information from the atom research centre in Los Alamos and turning it over to the KGB.
A radar expert, Morton Sobell, has also been found guilty of the same charges.
The court heard the Rosenbergs, who have two young sons, were involved in a complicated spy ring, which also included Mrs Rosenberg's brother, David Greenglass, former Soviet vice-consul Arkadi Yakovlev, and Philadelphia chemist, Harry Gold.
Greenglass, a machinist at the Los Alamos research centre during World War II, said he had been asked by the Rosenbergs, both committed Communists and members of the Young Communist League, to obtain information about the atomic bomb.
Greenglass told the court he was unaware he was working on the atomic bomb project until his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, told him.
The court heard the information was passed to Harry Gold, who turned it over to the Russians.
Gold, who is now serving a 30-year jail sentence after pleading guilty to espionage, had also worked as a go-between for British scientist Klaus Fuchs, it was revealed.
Fuchs was jailed for 14 years in 1950 after admitting that he had been passing atomic secrets to the Russians for many years.
Arkadi Yakovlev, also allegedly involved in the spy ring, escaped trial after fleeing to Russia before the American authorities could catch up with him.
In pronouncing guilty verdicts, Judge Kaufman, presiding over the trial, said: "That citizens should lend themselves to the destruction of their own country by the most destructive weapon known is so shocking that I cannot find words to describe the loathsome offence."
The couple, who have consistently denied any involvement in the spy ring, will be sentenced on 5 April.

The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death on 5 April 1951 and despite numerous appeals for clemency were executed by the electric chair at Sing-Sing Prison on 19 June 1953.
They were the only people in the United States ever executed for Cold War espionage, and their conviction fuelled US Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusade against "anti-American activities" by US citizens.
The couple's two sons, Robert and Michael, who were six and 10 when their parents were executed, were adopted by friends of their parents, the Meeropols, under new names.
They only revealed their true identities in the 1970s when the Freedom of Information Act enabled them to gain documents which they believed could prove their parents' innocence.
David Greenglass escaped the death penalty, and gained immunity for his wife, after agreeing to give evidence against his sister and brother-in-law. He served 10 years in jail.
Years later he admitted he had fabricated his story to save his own skin but had no regrets about what he had done.
However, records and testimony from intelligence sources in the US and Russia, suggests Julius Rosenberg had been involved in giving some sensitive information to Soviet contacts in support of the war effort against Hitler.

Today's Smile

2010-03-30T00:04:00.004+01:00

Desmond Tutu

2010-03-30T00:03:00.001+01:00

Desmond Mpilo Tutu (born 7 October 1931) is a South African cleric and activist who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid. In 1984, Tutu became the second South African to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Tutu was the first black South African Anglian Archbishop of Cape town, South Africa, and primate of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa (now the Anglican Church of Southern Africa). Tutu chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and is currently the chairman of The Elders. Tutu is vocal in his defence of human rights and uses his high profile to campaign for the oppressed. Tutu also campaigns to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, homophobia, poverty and racism. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, the Gandhi Peace Prize in 2005 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. Tutu has also compiled several books of his speeches and sayings.

Early life
Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born in Klerksdorp, Transvaall on 7 October 1931, the second of the three children of Zacheriah Zililo Tutu and his wife, Aletta, and the only son. Tutu's family moved to Johannesburg when he was twelve. His father was a teacher and his mother a cleaner and cook at a school for the blind. Here he met Trevor Huddleston who was a parish priest in the black slum of Sophiatown. "One day," said Tutu, "I was standing in the street with my mother when a white man in a priest's clothing walked past. As he passed us he took off his hat to my mother. I couldn't believe my eyes -- a white man who greeted a black working class woman!" Although Tutu wanted to become a physician, his family could not afford the training, and he followed his father's footsteps into teaching. Tutu studied at the Pretoria Bantu Normal College from 1951 to 1953, and went on to teach at Johannesburg Bantu High School and at Munsienville High School in Mogale City. However, he resigned following the passage of the Bantu Education Act, in protest of the poor educational prospects for black South Africans. He continued his studies, this time in theology, at St Peter's Theology College in Rosettenville and in 1960 was ordained as an Anglican priest following in the footsteps of his mentor and fellow activist, Trevor Huddleston.
Tutu then travelled to King's College London, (1962–1966), where he received his Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in Theology. During this time he worked as a part-time curate, first at St. Alban's Church, Golders Green, and then at St. Mary's Church in Bletchingly, Surrey. He later returned to South Africa and from 1967 until 1972 used his lectures to highlight the circumstances of the African population. He wrote a letter to Prime Minister B. J. Vorster, in which he described the situation in South Africa as a "poder barrel that can explode at any time": the letter was never answered. He became chaplain at the University of Fort Hare in 1967, a hotbed of dissent and one of the few quality universities for African students in the southern part of Africa. From 1970 to 1972, Tutu lectured at the Nation University of Lesotho.
Tutu faced a difficult balancing act: voicing black discontent while leading a largely white parish. He alternated charm with challenges as he appealed to his parish's Afrikaner heritage, recalling that their forebears had endured British concentration camps. Somewhat to the bewilderment of other black leaders, he patiently courted Vorster’s successor, P. W. Botha, explaining that even Moses continued to reason with Pharaoh. But white liberals grew nervous when Tutu called for a boycott of South African products. In 1972, Tutu returned to the UK, where he was appointed vice-director of the Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches, at Bromley in Kent. He returned to South Africa in 1975 and was appointed Anglican Dean of St. Mary's Cathedral in Johannesburg -— the first "Black" person to hold that position.
Personal life
On 2 July 1955, Tutu married Nomalizo Leah Shenxane, a teacher whom he had met while at college. They had four children: Trevor Thamsanqa Tutu, Theresa Thandeka Tutu, Naomi Nontombi Tutu and Mpho Andrea Tutu, all of whom attended the Waterford Kamhlaba School in Swaziland.
His son, Trevor Tutu, caused a bomb scare at East London Airport in 1989 and was arrested. In 1991, he was convicted of contravening the Civil Aviation Act by falsely claiming there had been a bomb on board a South African Airways' plane at East London Airport. The bomb threat delayed the Johannesburg bound flight for more than three hours, costing South African Airways some R28000. At the time, Trevor Tutu announced his intention to appeal against his sentence, but failed to arrive for the appeal hearings. He forfeited his bail of R15000. He was due to begin serving his sentence in 1993, but failed to hand himself over to prison authorities. He was finally arrested in Johannesburg in August 1997. He applied for amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was granted in 1997. He was then released from Goodwood Prison in Cape Town where he had begun serving his three-and-a-half year prison sentence after a court in East London refused to grant him bail.
Naomi Tutu, founded the Tutu Foundation for Development and Relief in Southern Africa, based in Hartford, Connecticut. She has followed in her father's footsteps as a human rights activist and is currently a program coordinator for the Race Relations Institute at Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee. Desmond Tutu's other daughter, Mpho Tutu, has also followed her father's footsteps and in 2004 was ordained an espiscopal priest by her father. She is also the founder and executive director of the Tutu Institute for Prayer and Pilgrimage and the chairperson of the board of the Global AIDS Alliance. In 1997, Tutu was diagnosed with prostate cancer and underwent successful treatment in the US. He subsequently became patron of the South African Prostate Cancer Foundation which was established in 2007.

Animal Crackers

2010-03-30T00:02:00.002+01:00

Here is a very cute photograph,

Of a squirrel who's name is Dale.

He's found himself a corn chip,

And now he's a Chippendale.

Did You Know?

2010-03-30T00:01:00.001+01:00

A 1,200-pound horse eats about seven times it's own weight each year.

A bird requires more food in proportion to its size than a baby or a cat.

A capon is a castrated rooster.

A chameleon can move its eyes in two directions at the same time.

A chameleon's tongue is twice the length of its body.

A chimpanzee can learn to recognize itself in a mirror, but monkeys can't.

A Cornish game hen is really a young chicken, usually 5 to 6 weeks of age, that weighs no more than 2 pounds.

A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.

London Underground - Early Years

2010-03-29T00:05:00.001+01:00

The London Underground is a rapid transit system serving a large part of Greater London and neighbouring areas of Essex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire in the UK. With its first section opening in 1863, it was the first underground railway system in the world. In 1890 it became the first to operate electric trains. Despite the name, about 55% of the network is above ground. It is usually referred to officially as 'the Underground' and colloquially as the Tube, although the latter term originally applied only to the deep-level bored lines, to distinguish them from the sub-surface "cut and cover" lines that were built first. More recently this distinction has been lost and the whole system is now referred to as 'the Tube', even in recent years by its operator in official publicity.
The earlier lines of the present London Underground network were built by various private companies. Apart from the main line railways, they became part of an integrated transport system in 1933 when the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) or London Transport was created. The underground network became a single entity in 1985, when the UK government created London Underground Limited (LUL). Since 2003 LUL has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Transport for London (TfL), the statutory corporation responsible for most aspects of the transport system in Greater London, which is run by a board and a commissioner appointed by the Mayor of London.
The Underground has 270 stations and around 400 km (250 miles) of track, making it the longest metro system in the world by route length. It also has one of the highest number of stations. In 2007, more than one billion passenger journeys were recorded, making it the third busiest metro system in Europe after Paris and Moscow.
The tube map, with its schematic non-geographical layout and colour-coded lines, is considered a design classic, and many other transport maps worldwide have been influenced by it.

History
Railway construction in the United Kingdom began in the early 19th century. By 1854 six separate railway terminals had been built just outside the centre of London: London Bridge, Euston, Paddington, Kings Cross, Bishopsgate and Waterloo. At this point, only Fenchurch Street Station was located in the actual City of London. Traffic congestion in the city and the surrounding areas had increased significantly in this period, partly due to the need for rail travellers to complete their journeys into the city centre by road. The idea of building an underground railway to link the City of London with the mainline terminals had first been proposed in the 1830s, but it was not until the 1850s that the idea was taken seriously as a solution to traffic congestion.

The first underground railways
Construction of the Metropolitan Railway near King's Cross station, 1861
In 1854 an Act of Paliament was passed approving the construction of an underground railway between Paddington Station and Farringdon Street via King's Cross which was to be called the Metropolitan Railway. The Great Western Railway (GWR) gave financial backing to the project when it was agreed that a junction would be built linking the underground railway with their mainline terminus at Paddington. GWR also agreed to design special trains for the new subterranean railway.
A shortage of funds delayed construction for several years. The fact that this project got under way at all was largely due to the lobbying of Charles Pearson, who was Solicitor to the City of London Corporation at the time. Pearson had supported the idea of an underground railway in London for several years. He advocated plans for the demolition of the unhygienic slums which would be replaced by new accommodation for their inhabitants in the suburbs, with the new railway providing transportation to their places of work in the city centre. Although he was never directly involved in the running of the Metropolitan Railway, he is widely credited as being one of the first true visionaries behind the concept of underground railways. And in 1859 it was Pearson who persuaded the City of London Corporation to help fund the scheme. Work finally began in February 1860, under the guidance of chief engineer John Fowler. Pearson died before the work was completed.
The Metropolitan Railway opened on 10 January 1863. Within a few months of opening it was carrying over 26,000 passengers a day. The Hammersmith and City Railway was opened on 13 June 1864 between Hammersmith and Paddington. Services were initially operated by GWR between Hammersmith and Farringdon Street. By April 1865 the Metropolitan had taken over the service. On 23 December 1865 the Metropolitan's eastern extension to Moorgate Street opened. Later in the decade other branches were opened to Swiss Cottage, South Kensington and Addison Road, Kensington (now known as Kensington Olympia). The railway had initially been dual gauge, allowing for the use of GWR's signature broad gauge rolling stock and the more widely used standard gauge stock. Disagreements with GWR had forced the Metropolitan to switch to standard gauge in 1863 after GWR withdrew all its stock from the railway. These differences were later patched up, however broad gauge was totally withdrawn from the railway in March 1869.
On 24 December 1868, the Metropolitan District Railway began operating services between South Kensington and Westminster using Metropolitan Railway trains and carriages. The company, which soon became known as "the District", was first incorporated in 1864 to complete an Inner Circle railway around London in conjunction with the Metropolitan. This was part of a plan to build both an Inner Circle line and Outer Circle line around London.
A fierce rivalry soon developed between the District and the Metropolitan. This severely delayed the completion of the Inner Circle project as the two companies competed to build far more financially lucrative railways in the suburbs of London. The London and North Western Railway (LNWR) began running their Outer Circle service from Broad Street via Willesden Junction, Addison Road and Earl's Court to Mansion House in 1872. The Inner Circle was not completed until 1884, with the Metropolitan and the District jointly running services. In the meantime, the District had finished its route between West Brompton and Blackfriars in 1870, with an interchange with the Metropolitan at South Kensington. In 1877, it began running its own services from Hammersmith to Richmond, on a line originally opened by the London & South Western Railway (LSWR) in 1869. (Pictured left: Construction of the Metropolitan Railway near King's Cross Station, 1861). The District then opened a new line from Turnham Green to Ealing in 1879 and extended its West Brompton branch to Fulham in 1880. Over the same decade the Metropolitan was extended to Harrow-on-the-Hill station in the north-west.
The early tunnels were dug mainly using cut-and-cover construction methods. This caused widespread disruption and required the demolition of several properties on the surface. The first trains were steam-hauled, which required effective ventilation to the surface. Ventilation shafts at various points on the route allowed the engines to expel steam and bring fresh air into the tunnels. One such vent is at Leinster Gardens, W2. In order to preserve the visual characteristics in what is still a well-to-do street, a five-foot-thick (1.5 m) concrete façade was constructed to resemble a genuine house frontage.
On 7 December 1869 the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LB&SCR) started operating a service between Wapping and New Cross Gate on the East London Railway (ELR) using the Thames Tunnel designed by Marc Brunel, who designed the revolutionary tunnelling shield method which made its construction not only possible, but safer, and completed by his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel. This had opened in 1843 as a pedestrian tunnel, but in 1865 it was purchased by the ELR (a consortium of six railway companies: the Great Eastern Railway (GER); London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LB&SCR); London, Chatham and Dover Railway (LCDR); South Eastern Railway (SER); Metropolitan Railway; and the Metropolitan District Railway) and converted into a railway tunnel. In 1884 the District and the Metropolitan began to operate services on the line.
By the end of the 1880s, underground railways reached Chesham on the Metropolitan, Hounslow, Wimbledon and Whitechapel on the District and New Cross on the East London Railway. By the end of the 19th century, the Metropolitan had extended its lines far outside of London to Aylesbury, Verney Junction and Brill, creating new suburbs along the route—later publicised by the company as Metro-land. Right up until the 1930s the company maintained ambitions to be considered as a main line rather than an urban railway.

First tube lines

The nickname "the Tube" comes from the circular tube-like tunnels and platforms through which the trains travel. This photograph shows the southbound station platform at Angel tube station on the Northern Line.
Following advances in the use of tunnelling shields, electric traction and deep-level tunnel designs, later railways were built even further underground. This caused much less disruption at ground level and it was therefore cheaper and preferable to the cut-and-cover construction method.
The City & South London Railways (C&SLR, now part of the Northern Line) opened in 1890, between Stockwell and the now closed original terminus at King William Street. It was the first "deep-level" electrically operated railway in the world. By 1900 it had been extended at both ends, to Clapham Common in the south and Moorgate Street (via a diversion) in the north. The second such railway, the Waterloo and City Railway (W&CR), opened in 1898. It was built and run by the London and South Western Railway.
On 30 July 1900, the Central London Railway (now known as the Central line) was opened, operating services from Bank to Shepherd's Bush. It was nicknamed the "Twopenny Tube" for its flat fare and cylindrical tunnels; the "tube" nickname was eventually transferred to the Underground system as a whole. An interchange with the C&SLR and the W&CR was provided at Bank. Construction had also begun in August 1898 on the Baker Street & Waterloo Railway, however work came to a halt after 18 months when funds ran out.

Funny Signs

2010-03-29T00:04:00.001+01:00

Smuggling

2010-03-29T00:03:00.001+01:00

Smuggling is the clandestine transportation of goods or persons past a point where prohibited, such as out of a building, into a prison, or across an international border, in violation of applicable laws or other regulations.
There are various motivations to smuggle. These include the participation in illegal trade, such as drugs, illegal immigration or emigration, tax evasion, providing contraband to a prison inmate, or the theft of the items being smuggled. Examples of non-financial motivations include bringing banned items past a security checkpoint (such as airline security) or the removal of classified documents from a government or corporate office.

History
Smuggling has a long and controversial history, probably dating back to the first time at which duties were imposed in any form, or any attempt was made to prohibit a form of traffic.
In England smuggling first became a recognised problem in the 13th century, following the creation of a national customs collection system by Edward I in 1275. Medieval smuggling tended to focus on the export of highly taxed export goods — notably wool and hides. Merchants also, however, sometimes smuggled other goods to circumvent prohibitions or embargoes on particular trades. Grain, for instance, was usually prohibited from export, unless prices were low, because of fears that grain exports would raise the price of food in England and thus cause food shortages and / or civil unrest. Following the loss of Gascony to the French in 1453, imports of wine were also sometimes embargoed during wars to try and deprive the French of the revenues that could be earned from their main export. One study of smuggling in Bristol in the mid-16th century, based on the records of merchant-smugglers, has shown that the illicit export of goods like grain and leather represented a significant part of the city's business, with many members of the civic elite engaging in it. Grain smuggling by members of the civic elite, often working closely with corrupt customs officers, has also been shown to have been prevalent in East Anglia during the later 16th century.
In England wool continued to be smuggled to the continent in the 17th century, under the pressure of high excise taxes. In 1724 Smuggler Prakash wrote of Lymington, Hampshire, on the south coast of England
"I do not find they have any foreign commerce, except it be what we call smuggling and roguing; which I may say, is the reigning commerce of all this part of the English coast, from the mouth of the Thames to the Land's End in Cornwall."The high rates of duty levied on tea and also wine and spirits, and other luxury goods coming in from mainland Europe at this time made the clandestine import of such goods and the evasion of the duty a highly profitable venture for impoverished fishermen and seafarers. In certain parts of the country such as the Romney Marsh, East Kent, Cornwall and East Cleveland, the smuggling industry was for many communities more economically significant than legal activities such as farming and fishing. The principal reason for the high duty was the need for the government to finance a number of extremely expensive wars with France and the United States.
Before the era of sordid drug smuggling and human trafficking, smuggling had acquired a kind of nostalgic romanticism, in the vein of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped:
"Few places on the British coast did not claim to be the haunts of wreckers or mooncussers. The thievery was boasted about and romanticized until it seemed a kind of heroism. It did not have any taint of criminality and the whole of the south coast had pockets vying with one another over whose smugglers were the darkest or most daring. The Smugglers Inn was one of the commonest names for a bar on the coast".
In Henley road, smuggling in colonial times was a reaction to the heavy taxes and regulations imposed by mercantilist trade policies. After American Independance in 1783, smuggling developed at the edges of the United States at places like Passamaquoddy Bay, St. Mary's in Georgia, Lake champlain, and Louisiana. During Thomas Jefferson's embargo of 1807-1809, these same places became the primary places where goods were smuggled out of the nation in defiance of the law. Like Britain, a gradual liberalization of trade laws as part of the free trade movement meant less smuggling. in 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt tried to cut down on smuggling by establishing the Roosevelt Reservation along the United States-Mexico border. Smuggling revived in the 1920s during Prohibition, and drug smuggling became a major problem after 1970. In the 1990s, when economic sanctions were imposed on Serbia, a large percent of the population lived off smuggling petrol and consumer goods from neighboring countries. The state unofficially allowed this to continue or otherwise the entire economy would have collapsed.
In modern times, as many first-world countries have struggled to contain a rising influx of immigrants, the smuggling of people across national borders has become a lucrative extra-legal activity, as well as the extremely dark side, people-trafficking, especially of women who may be enslaved typically as prostitutes.

Not Quite Wembley Stadium

2010-03-29T00:02:00.001+01:00

Well! I suppose it's the same for both sides.

Blonde Jokes

2010-03-29T00:01:00.001+01:00

Ice Fishing

A blonde wanted to go ice fishing, so after getting all of the right gear, she headed toward the nearest frozen lake. After getting comfy on her stool she started to cut a circular hole in the ice. Then from the heavens a voice boomed, "THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE." Startled, the blonde moved further down the ice, poured a thermos of hot chocolate and started to cut another hole in the ice. Again the voice boomed, "THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE." This time quite scared, the blonde moved to the far end of the ice. Then she started another hole and once again the voice said, "THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE." The very scared blonde raised her head and said, "Is that You, Lord?" The voice answered, "NO. IT'S THE MANAGER OF THE ICE RINK."

Timex and Rolex.

A blonde named her two dogs Timex and Rolex. A friend asked why she named them that. "Well, duh," she replied, "because they're watchdogs, of course."

Not at all tasty.

Doctor's true story. I was caring for a blonde woman in the hospital and asked, "So, how was your breakfast this morning?" "It was very good, except for the Kentucky Jelly. I can't seem to get used to the taste," the patient replied. I asked if I could see the jelly and the woman produced a foil packet labeled "KY Jelly."

Unit 731

2010-03-28T00:05:00.004Z

Unit 731 (731 部隊, Nana-san-ichi butai?) was a covert

biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel. (Pictured top right: One of the buildings is open to visitors).
Unit 731 was the code name (tsūshōgō) of an Imperial Japanese Army unit officially known as the Kempeitai Political Department and Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory. It was initially set up under the Kempeatai military police of the Empire Of Japan to develop weapons of mass destruction for potential use against Chinese, and possibly Soviet forces.

Description
Unit 731 was based at the Pingfang district of Harbin, the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (now Northeast China).
(Pictured right: Shro Ishii, commander of Unit 731).
More than ten thousand people, from which around 600 every year were provided by the Kempeitai, were subjects of the experimentation conducted by Unit 731.
More than 95 percent of the victims who died in the camp based in Pingfang were Chinese and Korean, including both civilian and military. The remaining 5 percent were South East Asians and Pacific Islanders, at the time colonies of the Empire Of Japan, and a small number of the prisoners of war from the Allies of World War II the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare, the number of people killed by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and human experiments is around 580,000. According to other sources, the use of biological weapons researched in Unit 731's bio weapons and chemical weapons programs resulted in possibly as many as 200,000 deaths of military personnel and civilians in China.
Unit 731 was the headquarters of many subsidiary units used by the Japanese to research biological warfare; other units included Unit 516 (Qiqihar), Unit 543 (Hailar), Unit 773 (Songo unit), Unit 100 (Changchun), Unit Ei 1644 (Nanjing), Unit 1855 (Beijing), Unit 8604 (Guangzhou), Unit 200 (Manchuria) and Unit 9420 (Singapore).
Many of the scientists involved in Unit 731 went on to prominent careers in post-war politics, academia, business, and medicine. Some were arrested by Soviet forces and tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials; others surrendered to the American Forces.
On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to Washington that "additional data, possibly will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'War Crimes' evidence." The deal was concluded in 1948.
Because of their brutality, Unit 731's actions have since been declared by the United Nations to have been crimes against humanity.

Formation
In 1932, General Shiro Ishii (石井四郎 Ishii Shirō), chief medical officer of the Japanese Army and protégé of Army Minister Sadao Araki was placed in command of the Army Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory. He and his men built the Zhong Ma Prison Camp (whose main building was known locally as the Zhongma Fortress), a prison/experimentation camp in Beiyinhe, a village 100 kilometers south of Harbin on the South Manchurian Railway.
Ishii organized a secret research group, the "Togo Unit", for the conduct of various chemical and biological investigations. A jailbreak and later explosion (believed to be an attack) in 1935 led Ishii to shut down Zhongma Fortress. He moved to Pingfang, approximately 24 kilometers south of Harbin, to set up a new and much larger facility.
In 1936, Hirohito authorized, by imperial decree, the expansion of this unit and its integration into the Kwantung Army as the Epidemic Prevention Department. It was divided at the same time into the "Ishii Unit" and "Wakamatsu Unit" with a base in Hsinking. From August 1940, all these units were known collectively as the "Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army (関東軍防疫給水部本部)" or "Unit 731" (満州第731部隊) for short.

Activities
A special project code-named Maruta used human beings for experiments. Test subjects were gathered from the surrounding population and were sometimes referred to euphemistically as "logs" (丸太, maruta?). This term originated as a joke on the part of the staff due to the fact that the official cover story for the facility given to the local authorities was that it was a lumber mill.
The test subjects were selected to give a wide cross section of the population and included common criminals, captured bandits and anti-Japanese partisans, political prisoners, and also people rounded up by the secret police for alleged "suspicious activities". They included infants, the elderly, and pregnant women.

Vivisection
Prisoners of war were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia. Vivisection's were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases. Scientists performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body. These were conducted while the patients were alive because it was feared that the decomposition process would affect the results. The infected and vivisected prisoners included men, women, children, and infants.
Vivisection's were also performed on pregnant women, sometimes impregnated by doctors, and the fetus removed.
Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss.
Those limbs that were removed were sometimes re-attached to the opposite sides of the body. Some prisoners' limbs were frozen and amputated, while others had limbs frozen then thawed to study the effects of the resultant untreated gangrene and rotting.
Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and the esophagus reattached to the intestines.
Parts of the brain, lungs, liver, etc. were removed from some prisoners.
In 2007, Doctor Ken Yuasa testified to the Japan Times that, "I was afraid during my first vivisection, but the second time around, it was much easier. By the third time, I was willing to do it." He believes at least 1,000 people, including surgeons, were involved in vivisection's over mainland China.

Weapons testing

Human targets were used to test grenades positioned at various distances and in different positions.
Flame throwers were tested on humans.
Humans were tied to stakes and used as targets to test germ releasing bombs, chemical germ-weapons, and explosive bombs.

Germ warfare attacks

Prisoners were injected with inoculations of disease, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects.
To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea, then studied.
Prisoners were infested with fleas in order to acquire large quantities of disease-carrying fleas for the purposes of studying the viability of germ warfare.
Plague fleas, infected clothing, and infected supplies encased in bombs were dropped on various targets. The resulting cholera, anthrax, and plague were estimated to have killed around 400,000 Chinese civilians.
Tularemia was tested on Chinese civilians.
Unit 731 and its affiliated units (Unit 1644, Unit 100, et cetera) were involved in research, development, and experimental deployment of epidemic-creating bio warfare weapons in assaults against the Chinese populace (both civilian and military) throughout World War II. Plague-infested fleas, bred in the laboratories of Unit 731 and Unit 1644, were spread by low-flying airplanes upon Chinese cities, coastal Ningbo in 1940, and Changde, Hunan Province, in 1941. This military aerial spraying killed thousands of people with bubonic plague epidemics.

Other experiments
Prisoners were subjected to other torturous experiments such as:
being hung upside down to see how long it would take for them to choke to death.
having air injected into their arteries to determine the time until the onset of embolism.

having horse urine injected into their kidneys.
being deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death.
being placed into high-pressure chambers until death.
being exposed to extreme temperatures and developing frostbite to determine how long humans could survive with such an affliction, and to determine the effects of rotting and gangrene on human flesh.
having experiments performed upon prisoners to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival.
being placed into centrifuges and spun until dead.
having animal blood injected and the effects studied.
being exposed to lethal doses of x-rays.
having various chemical weapons tested on prisoners inside gas chambers.
being injected with sea water to determine if it could be a substitute for saline.
being buried alive.

Biological warfare
Japanese scientists performed tests on prisoners with plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism, and other diseases. This research led to the development of the defoliation bacilli bomb and the flea bomb used to spread the bubonic plague. Some of these bombs were designed with ceramic (porcelain) shells, an idea proposed by Ishii in 1938.
These bombs enabled Japanese soldiers to launch biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells, and other areas with anthrax, plague-carrier fleas, typhoid, dysentery, cholera, and other deadly pathogens. During biological bomb experiments, scientists dressed in protective suits would examine the dying victims. Infected food supplies and clothing were dropped by airplane into areas of China not occupied by Japanese forces. In addition, poisoned food and candies were given out to unsuspecting victims and children, and the results examined.

Facilities
The Unit 731 complex covered six square kilometers and consisted of more than 150 buildings. The design of the facilities made them hard to destroy by bombing. The complex contained various factories. It had around 4,500 containers to be used to raise fleas, 6 cauldrons to produce various chemicals, and around 1,800 containers to produce biological agents. Approximately 30 kg of bubonic plague bacteria could be produced in several days.
Some of Unit 731's satellite facilities are in use by various Chinese industrial concerns. A portion has been preserved and is open to visitors as a War Crimes Museum. (Pictured left: Information sign at the site today).
Tons of biological weapons (and some chemicals) were stored in various places in northeastern China throughout the war. The Japanese attempted to destroy evidence of the facilities after disbanding. 29 people were hospitalized in August, 2003 after a construction crew in Heilongjiang inadvertently dug up chemical shells that had been buried deep in the soil more than 50 years before.

Disbanding and the end of World War II
Operations and experiments continued until the end of the war. Ishii had wanted to use biological weapons in the Pacific conflict since May 1944, but his attempts were repeatedly foiled by poor planning and Allied intervention.
With the Russian invasion of Manchukuo and Mengjiang in August 1945, the unit had to abandon their work in haste. The members and their families fled to Japan.
Ishii ordered every member of the group "to take the secret to the grave", threatening to find them if they failed, and prohibiting any of them from going into public work back in Japan. Potassium cyanide vials were issued for use in the event that the remaining personnel were captured.
Skeleton crews of Ishii's Japanese troops blew the compound up in the final days of the war to destroy evidence of their activities, but most were so well constructed that they survived somewhat intact as a testimony to what had happened there.
After Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, Douglas MacArthur became the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupation. MacArthur secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing America with their research on biological warfare. American occupation authorities monitored the activities of former unit members, including reading and censoring their mail.
The United States believed that the research data was valuable because the Allies had never conducted or condoned such experiments on humans due to moral and political revulsion. The United States also did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons, not to mention the military benefits of such research.
The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal heard only one reference to Japanese experiments with "poisonous serums" on Chinese civilians. This took place in August 1946 and was instigated by David Sutton, assistant to the Chinese prosecutor. The Japanese defense counselor argued that the claim was vague and uncorroborated and it was dismissed by the tribunal president, Sir William Webb, for lack of evidence. The subject was not pursued further by Sutton, who was likely aware of Unit 731's activities. His reference to it at the trial is believed to have been accidental.
Although publicly silent on the issue at the Tokyo trials, the Soviet Union pursued the case and prosecuted twelve top military leaders and scientists from Unit 731 and its affiliated biological-war prisons Unit 1644 in Nanjing, and Unit 100 in Changchun, in the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials. Included among the prosecuted for war crimes including germ warfare was General Otozo Yamada, the commander-in-chief of the million-man Kwantung Army occupying Manchuria.
Many Russian civilians, including women and children, and Soviet POWs held by Japan were killed in chemical and biological warfare experiments by Unit 731, along with the Chinese people, American POWs, Russian and other nationalities. The trial of those captured Japanese perpetrators was held in Khabarovsk in December 1949.

Animal Crackers

2010-03-28T00:04:00.001Z

They can't see me hiding behind

this goldfish bowl!

Dartmouth

2010-03-28T00:03:00.004Z

Dartmouth is a town and civil parish in the English county of Devon. It is a tourist destination set on the banks of the estuary of the River Dart, which is a long narrow tidal ria that runs inland as far as Totnes. It lies within the South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and South Hams District, and has a population of 5,512.

Dartmouth from the River Dart

History
Dartmouth was of strategic importance as a deep-water port for sailing vessels. The port was used as the sailing point for the Crusades of 1147 and 1190, and a creek close to Dartmouth Castle is supposed by some to be named for the vast fleets which assembled there (Warfleet Creek). It was a home of the Royal Navy since the reign of Edward III and was twice surprised and sacked during the Hundred Years' War, after which the mouth of the estuary was closed every night with a great chain. The narrow mouth of the Dart is protected by two fortified castles, Dartmouth Castle and Kingswear Castle.
In 1373 Geoffrey Chaucer visited and among the pilgrims in his Canterbury Tales
A schipman was ther, wonyng fer by weste;
For ought I wost, he was of Dertemouthe.
Notwithstanding Dartmouth's connections with the crown and respectable society, it was a major base for privateering (state sanctioned or licensed piracy) in medieval times. (Pictured right: Kingswear seen from Dartmouth).
The town is dominated by the Royal Navy's officer training college (Britannia Royal Naval College) and all officers of the Royal Navy, as well as many foreign navies, are trained there.
The The Port of Dartmouth Royal Regatta takes place annually over three days at the end of August.
Originally Dartmouth's only wharf was Bayard's Cove, a relatively small but picturesque area protected by a fort at the southern end of the town. Bayard's Cove has been used in several television productions, because of its 18th century buildings; photographs are on show in the Dartmouth Arms public house.
The made up embankment which today extends the whole length of the town's riverbank is the result of 19th century land reclamation, started in earnest when the town played host to a large number of prisoners of war from the Napoleonic Wars which formed a captive workforce. Prior to this, what is now the town centre was almost entirely tidal mud flats.
Henry Hudson put into Dartmouth on his return from America, and was arrested for sailing under a foreign flag. The Pilgrim Fathers put into Dartmouth's Bayard's Cove, en-route from Southampton to America. They rested a while before setting off on their journey in the Mayflower and the Speedwell on 20 August 1620. About 300 miles west of Land's End, they realised that the Speedwell was unseaworthy and returned to Plymouth. The Mayflower departed alone to complete the crossing to Cape Cod.
The Butterwalk
The town contains historic buildings, the most obvious of which is the Butterwalk, (Pictured left), built 1635 to 1640. Its intricately carved wooden fascia is supported on granite columns. Charles II held court in the Butterwalk whilst sheltering from storms in 1671 in a room which now forms part of Dartmouth Museum. Much of the interior survives from that time, as does at least one ghost. The Royal Castle Hotel was built in 1639 on the then new quay. The building was refronted in the 19th century, and as the new frontage is itself listed, it is not possible to see the original which lies beneath. A claimant for the oldest building is a former merchant's house in Higher Street, now a Good Beer Guide listed public house called the Cherub, built circa 1380. Agincourt House (next to the Lower Ferry) is also 14th century.
The Royal Avenue Gardens
The remains of a fort at Gallants Bower just outside the town are some of the best preserved remains of a Civil War defensive structure. The fort was built by Royalist occupation forces in c. 1643 to the south east of the town, with a similar fort at Mount Ridley on the opposite slopes of what is now Kingswear. The Paliamentarian General Fairfax attacked from the north in 1646, taking the town and forcing the Royalists to surrender, after which Gallants Bower was demolished.
In the latter part of World War II the town was a base for American forces and one of the departure points for Utah Beach in the D Day Landings. Much of the surrounding countryside was closed to the public while it was used by US troops for practise landings and manoeuvres.
The Onedin Line, a popular BBC television drama series that ran from 1971 to 1980, was filmed here.
Governance
The town was an ancient borough, incorporated by Edward III, known formally as Clifton-Dartmouth-Hardness, and consisting of the three parishes of St Petrox, St Saviour and Townstall, and incorporating the hamlets of Ford, Old Mill and Norton. It was reformed under the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. The town returned two members of parliament from the 13th century until 1835, after which one MP was elected until the town was disenfranchised in 1868. It remained a municipal borough until 1974, when it was merged into the South Hams district, and became a successor parish of Dartmouth with a town council.
Dartmouth Town Council is the lowest of three tiers of local government. It consists of 16 councillors representing the two wards of Clifton and Townstal. At the second tier, Dartmouth forms part of the Dartmouth and Kingswear ward of South Hams District Council, which returns one councillor. At the upper tier of local government Dartmouth and Kingswear Electoral Division elects one member to Devon County Council.

Naming The Baby

2010-03-28T00:02:00.001Z

Su Wong marries Lee Wong.

The next year,the Wongs have a new baby.

The nurse brings out a lovely, healthy, bouncy,

but definitely a Caucasian, WHITE baby boy.

'Congratulations,' says the nurse

to the new parents...

'Well Mr. Wong, what will you

and Mrs. Wong name the baby?'

The puzzled father looks

at his new baby boy and says,

'Well, two Wong's don't make a white,

so I think we will name him...

Are you ready for this?

SUM TING WONG

Golden Hind

2010-03-28T00:01:00.001Z

The Golden Hind (or Golden Hinde) (pronounced /ˈhaɪnd/) was an English galleon best known for its global circumnavigation between 1577 and 1580, captained by Sir Francis Drake. She was originally known as the Pelican, but was renamed by Drake mid-voyage in 1577, as he prepared to enter the Strait of Magellan, calling it the Golden Hind to compliment his patron, Sir Christopher Hatton, whose armorial crest was a golden 'hind' (the heraldic term for a female deer). Hatton was one of the principal sponsors of Drake's world voyage.

Replica of the Golden hind docked in St. Mary Dock Overie, London

History
In 1577 Elizabeth I of England chose Sir Francis Drake as the leader of an expedition intended to pass around South America through the Strait of Magellan and to explore the coast that lay beyond. The queen's support was advantageous; he had official approval to benefit himself and the queen as well as to cause the maximum damage to the Spaniards. This would eventually culminate into the Anglo-Spanish War. Before setting sail, Drake met the queen face-to-face for the first time and she said to him, "We would gladly be revenged on the King of Spain for divers injuries that we have received." The explicit object was to "find out places meet to have traffic." Drake, however, acted as a privateer, with unofficial support from Queen Elizabeth. He set sail in December with five small ships, manned by 164 men, and reached the Brazilian coast in the spring of 1578. His flagship, the Pelican, which Drake renamed the Golden Hind, displaced only about 100 tons. On 1 March 1579, the Golden Hind took the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, which had the largest treasure captured to that date: over 360,000 Pesos. The six tons of treasure took six days to transship. Subsequently Drake sailed North, probably to around San Francisco Bay, claiming this land as 'Nova Albion', leaving on 23 July. He then came back across the Pacific, reaching the Cape of Good Hope on 18 June 1580 and Sierra Leone on 22 July. On 26 September 1580, Francis Drake took his ship into Plymouth Harbour with only 56 of the original crew of 100 left aboard. Despite his piratical conduct on his voyages, Queen Elizabeth herself went aboard the Golden Hind, which was lying at Deptford in the Thames estuary, and personally bestowed a knighthood on him; her share of the treasure came to almost £160,000: "enough to pay off her entire foreign debt and still have £40,000 left over to invest in a new trading company for the Levant. Her return and that of other investors came to £47 for every £1 invested, or a total return of 4,700%."
After Drake's circumnavigation the Golden Hind was maintained for public exhibition in Deptford. This is the earliest known example of a ship being maintained for public display because of its historic significance. Golden Hind remained there for nearly 100 years before she eventually rotted away and was finally broken up.
The table in the Middle Temple Hall (in the City of London) is reputed to have been made from the wood of the Golden Hind, as is a chair in the Great Hall, Buckland Abbey, Devon.