BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Benny to Bennie: a winning combination.

A player doesn’t have to be bigger and rougher than his opponent, but he must have well-grounded habits of technique. Benny Friedman, in Stars and Stripes, 1951.

Most people of my age will remember when American footballers looked much like the rest of the male citizenry. All my uncles played the game in high school and then college, and they were all shorter than my dad (who ‘only’ played tennis and trumpet), and he was 6’2” and weighed in at 170 lbs. They were giants compared to the greatest all-American of their youths, Benny Friedman, who at his first high school (East Technical, in Cleveland) was told he was too slight for football. So Benny switched schools and led Glenville HS to the Cleveland championship in his senior year. He went on to a stellar career in college, then in the NFL, and finally as a coach and administrator. Throughout his playing career Benny remained slight in weight (160) and not tall (5’ 10” was not very short, either). But he played backfield, and most people would have thought him “normal” for a backfielder. Except perhaps that Benny Friedman was Jewish, born in Cleveland on March 18, 1905, his parents immigrants from Tsarist Russia (and its pogroms) who’d fetched up in Cleveland’s East Side, found each other, and married as ‘new’ Americans. After that stellar season at Glenville, Benny (who also starred at baseball and basketball) didn’t go to Ohio State but instead to Michigan, where he was thought too small. Plus, remember, this was iron man football, offense and defense, 60 minutes. Also, although the record doesn’t say that this was a problem at Michigan, Benny was a Jewish Ohioan. He didn’t come on field until his sophomore year, and then only as a substitute halfback, He showed his stuff, though, and in his Junior and Senior years (1925-1926) Benny tore up every turf in the (then) Western Conference. Benny ran, Benny kicked, Benny tackled, and Benny became known, too, for throwing “perfect spiral” forward passes (most of them to a Dutchman from western Michigan, ‘Bennie’ Oosterbaan). At this point, Benny’s Jewishness became an issue for the Jewish Times, which made him into a cultural hero. In Michigan Benny Friedman perhaps paved the way for Hank Greenberg, the ‘hammering Hebrew’ of the Detroit Tigers. Benny threw his ‘bullets’ in the NFL for 8 seasons, then moved into college coaching at CCNY, then Brandeis. Both abandoned football (CCNY in 1941, and Brandeis in 1960, during Benny’s tenure as Athletic Director), but we should not blame him for either cessation. For both the Beavers (CCNY) and the Owls (Brandeis), football had become too expensive. At about the same time, Brandeis teams became ‘The Judges.’ So we might judge that footballers had at the same time become too beefy for their own good. Certainly our modern gridiron heroes are beefier than Benny. ©.

[Stanley]

If you smoke, stop it.

I shouldn’t be surprised if I died of lung cancer. Dr. Evarts Ambrose Graham, quoted by Time magazine, 1957.

My first GP, Varina DesMarias (1915-2009) was my mother’s oldest friend and the first woman MD in Grundy County, Iowa. She saved my life when I was 4, but more importantly (I now think) she was widely reckoned to be a ‘character,’ an attribution of very rich meaning in small-town Iowa. One mark of her ‘character’ was that after years of heavy smoking (2+ packs daily of Lucky Strikes) Varina quit ‘cold turkey’ and then invested the money she saved in tobacco stocks. She quit after she read a pioneering study, “Tobacco Smoking as a Possible Etiologic Factor in Bronchiogenic Carcinoma,” published (in May 1950) in The Journal of the American Medical Association. It’s known as the ‘Wynder and Graham Study’ after its authors, Ernest Wynder and Evarts Graham. It was already widely thought that lung cancer was caused by environmental factors—but not by smoking tobacco. Indeed Evarts Graham was a smoker, a habit he’d improved upon as an army surgeon during World War I. Evarts Ambrose Graham was born in Chicago on March 19, 1883 and, after a Princeton BA, returned to Chicago to obtain his MD and do his hospital training. He also studied biochemistry at the University of Chicago, a new interdisciplinary specialty, and married a biochemist PhD, Helen Tredway. So Evarts Graham, MD, was scientifically inclined, and by the time of his war service was known already as a pioneer surgeon-scientist. It was for those strengths that he was appointed to the Bixby chair in surgery at Washington University in St. Louis. There, in 1933, he led a team in a surgical removal of the cancerous lung, more accurately one full lobe and a bit more, of Dr. James Gilmore, a Pittsburgh obstetrician. Professor Graham (as did Dr. Gilmore!!) kept on smoking, nevertheless, but in 1949 agreed to work with one of his medical students, Ernst Wynder, in a statistical study of the putative relationship between smoking and cancer. Their 1950 study was statistically conclusive, perhaps more so (because they used a larger sample of cancer patients and a larger control group) than the British Medical Association’s study of the same year. The Evarts and Wynder finding, a 96.4% correlation between smoking and lung cancer, was enough to convince Dr. DesMarias, in Grundy Center, who would live long enough, and invest enough money, to become a very rich woman. She and her sister Lillian, a librarian who died in 2012, would leave $8.3 million to a public library in rural Missouri. But that’s another story. Please note also that Dr. Graham’s son, Evarts A. Graham, Jr., continued his father’s benign influence on St. Louis by becoming editor-in-chief of the Post-Dispatch. ©.

[Stanley]

Cheaper by the dozen but profit for whom?

In the past, man has been first; in the future the system must be first. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911).

Growing up, one of my favorite books was Cheaper by the Dozen (1948), a mostly true story about a large and mostly happy family. It was written by the siblings Frank Gilbreth, Jr., and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, and it recalled their pleasant and sometimes comic lives as children of parents who were experts in efficient management, and who used their large brood to experiment in time and motion studies. I liked the book not because my family was small, unhappy, and inefficient (I didn’t think so, anyway); rather I was drawn into the story by the Gilbreths’ distinctive abilities to be democratic yet orderly, happy yet serious, nurturing yet competitive. In achieving these goals, or balances, the parents were vital. Frank Bunker Gilbreth (Sr.) was born in 1868. Despite the poverty brought on by his father’s death in 1871 and the depression of 1873-77, he transformed himself into a time and motion expert. He began to make sense of work as an apprentice bricklayer. Lillian Moller Gilbreth, who was ten years younger, lived 38 years longer, and gained greater fame, was a California PhD (psychology, at Berkeley) who married Frank in 1904, birthed 12 kids, and helped Frank make their family into a time and motion laboratory. Theirs was a great story, not to be ruined by derivative movies, one of them OK (Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy, 1950) and the other dreadful (Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt, 2003). But when I read Cheaper by the Dozen I couldn’t know that the Gilbreths’ goals (to improve the workplace and make it more pleasant and productive for all) were quite distinctive, and would put them at odds with a more famous management scientist, Frederick Taylor. Born on March 20, 1856, Taylor (despite his birth into Philadelphia’s ‘Main Line’ aristocracy), chose to work his way up from the industrial shop floor. Instead of going to Harvard, he took a shop floor job in a factory owned by family friends. There he observed that his workmates were (in various ways, some of them unconscious) misusing the firm’s capital wealth and thus limiting the profitable possibilities inherent in its efficient machines. Setting out to improve things at the Midvale Steel Works, Frederick Taylor would become, in time and in motion, the founder of “Taylorism.” In contrast to the Gilbreths’ family formulae, his would be a much more management-oriented view of efficiency, the aim of which was to reinforce management’s power, contribute more to bottom-line profits than to wages, and render labor unions powerless and thus superfluous. Workers might reap rewards for becoming more efficient, but their gains would always be proportionate to the prior, and Taylor thought better, claims of capital. Taylor and Frank Gilbreth both died before they could clash, but their followers fell out in the 1920s and 1930s and the rift marked an important, indeed critical, divide in American management science. Perhaps there was something more significant than I thought in that large Gilbreth family. “Cheaper by the dozen,” the Gilbreth children also shared more equally and more happily in their family's economies of scale. Their enterprise was aimed not solely for profit, but for the greater good to the greater number. And I am ready to forgive Frank, Jr., and his sister Ernestine for failing to mention that there were never more than eleven Gilbreth children. Sadly, their sister Mary (who should have been the 12th Gilbreth) died of diphtheria when she was aged only 5. Had Mary lived she would have been the 5th Gilbreth. The other 11 were Anne, Ern(estine), Mart(ha), Frank, Jr., Bill, Lill, Fred, Dan, Jack, Bob, and Jane. Perhaps, chez Gilbreth, monosyllabic names were much more efficient—yet also much more affectionate? ©

[Stanley]

Myths and lineages.

When we consider upon what ludicrous evidence the most preposterous beliefs have been easily and by millions entertained, we may well hesitate before pronouncing anything incredible. Hugh Trevor-Roper.

In the mid 1980s I argued (briefly) with Lady Mary Fitzalan Howard about one of her collateral ancestors, Lord Howard of Effingham. I lost the argument, or abandoned it, partly because Lady Mary knew more about her ancestry than I did. But I had (in 1979) investigated the lineages of the barons Dacre when the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper was ennobled as Lord Dacre of Glanton. In Oxford, I\u2019d had brief contact with Trevor-Roper, knew a bit about his fox-hunting youth, objected to his views on 17th-century English history and on the wearing of gowns in lecture halls, and made a snap judgment about his character. So I was amused to think about him as \u201cLord Dacre.\u201d In this he stressed his descent from Trevor Charles Roper (1745-1794), the 18th baron of the first creation of the barony. But he was a North Country man (Glanton, Trevor-Roper\u2019s birthplace, is in Northumberland) and could as easily have chosen Thomas Dacre (1527-1566) 4th baron Dacre of the second creation, whose ancestral manor was in Gilsland, barely a seed\u2019s throw from Glanton. And that would have made sense, for this Thomas Dacre was the father of a truly distinguished daughter, Anne Dacre, born on March 21, 1557, who would make her own contributions to the bloodlines of the Dacres, the Howards, and for that matter the Fitzalans. In the turbulent yet tentative English Reformation, Thomas Dacre was a closet Catholic, and had he lived longer might have got in hot water for it with Elizabeth I. On Thomas\u2019s death, Anne\u2019s mother married the stauncher Catholic Thomas Howard, 4th duke of Norfolk. For safety\u2019s sake, Anne was brought up Protestant. She married the duke\u2019s son Philip Howard (1557-1595), earl of Arundel. It was a stormy marriage, but the marital weather improved when both (re?)converted to Catholicism in the 1580s. This dangerous choice led to Philip\u2019s execution (for treason) in 1595. He was imprisoned in the Tower for years, and his meditations there would lead to his canonization in 1970. Anne Dacre, now Countess of Arundel, kept faith for the rest of her life with Philip and with the Bishop of Rome. And her own meditations, in verse, journals, and in her correspondence, made her into a literary figure of note. Her exemplary life of self-denial (she took a vow of chastity on Philip\u2019s execution). Poetic meditation and charitable work made her into a model of Catholic lay piety. But Hugh Trevor-Roper\u2019s loyalties belonged to the Dacres of the secondcreation. The family name itself may originate in the siege of Acre during the Third Crusade. But that\u2019s another story. \u00a9.

[Tripps]

But that's another story.

So is this. . . Fake Hitler Diaries

[Stanley]

Pioneer of the dance.

I was always making up dances. I knew right away that was the world for me. I never could endure a humdrum life. Ruth Page, in a 1977 interview.

The only humdrum thing I know about Ruth Page is that she was born in Indianapolis on March 22, 1899. Then her parents (an eminent surgeon and a noted amateur pianist), local patrons of all the arts, encouraged Ruth\u2019s enthusiasm for the dance, brought Anna Pavlova home as a houseguest, bought Ruth ever more expensive lessons from ever more eminent dance masters, and she left \u2018humdrum\u2019 behind. By the time Ruth had reached her 20s, she\u2019d danced professionally in New York and toured South America with Pavlova\u2019s company. There is every evidence that, when she married, in 1925, her husband knew what he was getting into. If he didn\u2019t, he soon found out, for on their honeymoon, in Paris, she danced with Serge Diaghilev\u2019s Ballets Russes. So Thomas Hart Fisher, a wealthy lawyer, became Ruth\u2019s partner in both marriage and the arts, becoming her agent-impresario in the dance business. And she made quite a business of it. Ruth herself danced into her 50s, in creative collaborations with the likes of composer Aaron Copland and choreographer Adolph Bohm. But her art was not just classical ballet, for she also danced on Broadway stages and Hollywood film sets. No humdrum for her. Accordingly, as impresario herself (head of several dance companies, teacher, choreographer) Ruth Page was known for her eclecticism. She herself danced in, and choreographed, famous productions. Especially notable was her \u201cFrankie and Johnny\u201d (1938) set to the infamous popular ballad (\u201cHe was her man but he done her wrong\u201d) about a low-life lover\u2019s homicide. But there was more. Page did \u201cHear Ye, Hear Ye\u201d (1934), themed on a murder trial and composed for her by Copland. She also took on a notorious American evangelist in her \u201cBilly Sunday\u201d (1946, later performed for national television). Today she\u2019s remembered more especially for her \u201cAmerican Pattern\u201d (1937). Originally titled \u201cAn American Woman,\u201d it\u2019s now seen as the first feminist ballet, in which the lead dancer seeks a solution to her ennui, but each time through a male figure and each time disappointed. Thus she sews herself into humdrum. One couldn\u2019t say that of Ruth Page. After Thomas Fisher died (in 1969) she kept at it, now too old to dance herself but not too old to innovate, nor to remarry. Ruth Page died in 1991. She was buried in Chicago\u2019s Graceland Cemetery. In 2015, Ruth got a new neighbor at Graceland, Ernie Banks, the wondrous hero of the (forever) also-ran Chicago Cubs. His monument is only a few feet from hers. She\u2019d have liked that, I think, for \u2018her\u2019 Billy Sunday was a baseballer before he began his new pitch as a preacher. It\u2019s a danceable story. \u00a9.

[Stanley]

The map that changed the world.

Organized fossils . . . are the antiquities of the earth; and very distinctly show its gradual regular formation. William Smith, 1817.

Henry Reynolds-Moreton (1827-1921), succeeded as 3rd earl of Dulcie in 1853. He was educated at Eton, played at cricket for his county, if only for one match. Besides serving (1857-1911!) as Gloucestershire\u2019s Lord Lieutenant, Dulcie held a number of government posts, mostly semi-honorable sinecures, and he dabbled in science. He created an elaborate arboretum on his father\u2019s estate, and on the strength of that was made a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS: it was probably the botany, although Dulcie also wrote a pamphlet on crocodile shooting). A good, useful chap, then, a gentleman and not a major player. But Dulcie was a lifelong Liberal, proud to honor real talent however humbly packaged, and it's to him we owe the William Smith Memorial, situated in a pleasant wood just outside Churchill, Oxfordshire, where William Smith was born on March 23, 1769, in very common circumstances and with a very common name. But when Lord Dulcie dedicated the William Smith Memorial, he could praise Smith \u2018the Father of English Geology.\u2019 For from his humble origins (Smith\u2019s father was the village blacksmith), William Smith became the maker of the first \u2018modern\u2019 geological map, showing (strikingly, in schematic colors) the main stone strata underlying England\u2019s green and pleasant land. Smith\u2019s map set a style which, in its fundamentals, has never been altered, and it has been appropriately called The Map that Changed the World. That\u2019s the title of an excellent biography of William Smith (2001) by Simon Winchester. Smith\u2019s is such a good story, and Winchester tells it well. I\u2019ve read it through twice. Self-taught, but clearly a ready learner, Smith apprenticed to a surveyor, then got involved in England\u2019s canal boom and then in surveying great landed estates in search of coal (in England\u2019s \u2018industrial revolution\u2019 coal had become way more profitable than sheep or wheat). In cutting canals and sinking mine shafts, Smith noticed that the land\u2019s substructure was layered and that the layers repeated themselves across (or under) England. Because each layer had its own character (and its own fossils), Smith intuited a long geological history. And he made his map. But his humble origins, his humility of bearing, and some bad fortune consigned Smith to debtors\u2019 prison and anonymity. Released from jail in 1819, aged 50, William Smith lived long enough (and England\u2019s layered society changed enough) that before he died in 1839 he had gained belated recognition: a scientific medal, a royal pension, and an honorary degree. And then, a half-century on, Lord Dulcie\u2019s memorial monolith: one good chap paying homage to another. \u00a9.

[Stanley]

The fine art of the hand craft.

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. William Morris.

William Morris was born in Walthamstow, Essex, on March 24, 1834. The village was not yet a London suburb, still leafy enough to contain the Morris family\u2019s Georgian mansion. Soon enough Walthamstow was suburbanized, even partially industrialized, absorbed into what Morris himself called the \u201cspreading sore\u201d of London. But Walthamstow still contains the Morris house, now known as the William Morris Gallery, and it boasts \u201cthe world\u2019s largest collection\u201d of William Morris\u2019s arts and crafts. The gallery looks out onto a modern urban scene, a discount superstore across the road and street after street of terraced houses. But behind it there\u2019s a large park, and the remains of Epping Forest are not far distant. It\u2019s called a \u2018Forest\u2019 not because there are trees (there are many trees) but because it was from the time of Henry II a royal preserve where only the king could enjoy the pleasures of the hunt, the chase and the kill. So one could say that the Morris gallery sits at a boundary between tradition and modernity, civilization and nature. That would be fitting, for by 1834 the Morris family\u2019s prosperity was based on copper mining shares, not estate management, profitable enough to send William to Marlborough College and then on to Oxford. There he fell in with friends who found modernity too tawdry for words, and set about to revive \u2018tradition.\u2019 After some experimentation with poetry and painting (and \u2018high church\u2019 religion) Morris devoted himself to refining the details of daily life through what became known as the arts and crafts movement. His grandest scale was the house beautiful (certainly not the city), and he would grace that house with beautiful things\u2014furniture, fabrics, stained glass, tableware\u2014all handcrafted. There was something of the radical democrat in Morris. He married his first model, Jane Burden, a working-class girl of ethereal beauty, and moved her (and soon their two daughters) into a house that was itself an experiment in the beauty of ordinary things. The marriage proved an unhappy one (for both), but it left us with \u201cthe Red House,\u201d a brick-built fantasy of lovely design and fascinating contents. It\u2019s also a bit higgledy-piggledy, and is now a property of England\u2019s National Trust. But William and Jane lived there for only a few years, increasingly miserable, before Morris set off to remake English taste in his preferred images. His vision of community, which included a primitive kind of socialism, was not to be realized. But his designs proved popular in his own time and, thanks to a mid-20th-century revival, can still be purchased today. Even in St. Louis, William Morris is part of our woodwork. \u00a9.

[Stanley]

The 'us' and the 'them.'

Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive. Mary Douglas.

The word \u201cmodern\u201d appeared in English round about 1500. As a recent migrant (a borrowing from Latin by way of Middle French), it was at first a modest word, meaning \u2018contemporary\u2019 or, in a comparative sense, \u2018not ancient.\u2019 Somewhere along the line, it became a value-laden delusion, used by those with no feeling for its implicit ironies and its ever-receding relativities to distinguish themselves (us the \u201cmoderns\u201d) from others (them the \u201cprimitives\u201d). It\u2019s a delusion laid bare when we contemplate what people, say five centuries hence, will think of us, but it has caused particular difficulties for those who would study the \u201cother,\u201d notably that tribe among us we call \u201canthropologists.\u201d Mary Douglas was an anthropologist who did much to dispel these delusions, and she accomplished this by finding a perspective from which she could study both the \u201cother\u201d and the \u201cus.\u201d One refreshing result is that in her treatments\u2014and there were many\u2014\u201cwe\u201d look rather like \u201cthem\u201d (or vice versa). Mary Douglas was born Margaret Mary Tew, in Italy, on March 25, 1921. She was herself a bit of an alien, her father and his family with a long tradition of service in British India, her mother a devout Roman Catholic of Irish extraction. Mary was schooled in Catholic convents and then at St. Anne\u2019s, Oxford, where she began her studies in anthropology. She married another anthropologist, James Douglas, also of Catholic and imperial stock. Her early research (on the Lele people of the Congo) convinced her of some signal identities between Lele and \u201cmodern\u201d culture, not \u2018functional\u2019 (the anthropological orthodoxy of her day) but rather religious or symbolic and, in either sense, universal and very human. She carried on with her influential Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Pollution and Taboo (1966), and then a host of other works, even one on consumer goods. Douglas never erased the differences between \u2018primitive\u2019 and \u2018modern\u2019 but her perspective did make it difficult to see the \u2018primitive\u2019 in pejorative terms. Human societies organize their perceptions of purity and danger in symbolisms: good and evil, sacred and sinful, cleanly and dirty. \u2018Moderns,\u2019 she came to argue, only seem to have replaced those polarities with the inherently negotiable idea of \u201crisk.\u201d We of the \u2018global north\u2019 (a term Douglas used in place of \u2018the west\u2019) like to think of these things in terms of statistics, probabilities. But when risks become manifest, our immediate response is to look for human error. Consider, for instance, the recent problems with the 737 jet. So our risks become Boeing\u2019s sins, evils to be investigated and expunged, and suddenly and all unaware we are back in the symbolic universe of the Lele. \u00a9

[Stanley]

At length and at last, a Shropshire lad.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with blooms along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide
--from A. E. Housman, \u2018Loveliest of Trees,\u2019 in A Shropshire Lad (1896)

A. E. Housman was not much known as a poet when, in 1896, he published his first collection. Indeed, he had to subsidize it. It sold spottily at first, but soon caught on, and has never been out of print. That makes it something of an oddity among poetry collections. Its autobiographical stance is unusual, too. In the poems the \u2018voice\u2019 is that of a young man, almost too old to be a lad, and yet beset with all the anxieties of youth\u2014and a few more. Indeed, after that opening paean to the cherry tree, the poem goes on to contemplate death. \u201cOf my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again.\u201d He\u2019s only got 50 left!! I was not yet 30 when first introduced to Housman\u2019s poetry, young enough to sympathize with those fears. Now, at 80, I find them slightly self-indulgent. But maybe Housman did, too. He was already 37 when he published A Shropshire Lad, old enough to put his own adolescence and its unhappinesses into perspective. He did this by setting his cherry tree in Shropshire\u2019s \u201cblue remembered hills,\u201d realistic enough for A. E. Housman was born in sight of them, in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, on March 26, 1859. He would be the eldest of seven children, and among the brightest. Housman excelled in school and then excelled at Oxford, where he read classics. But for various reasons (adolescent anxieties amongst them) he failed his finals which, given the importance of exams in English degrees, might have sunk him. Instead, he found enough income as a clerk to have enough spare time to produce excellent scholarship on various Latin and Greek texts. One remembers Albert Einstein\u2019s eerily similar experience (also as a patent office clerk) in Switzerland, before he launched modern physics. Indeed, Housman would become a respected professor in classics, first at London and then at Cambridge. As a teacher and critic, he could frighten the tender-hearted, and his drily authoritative manner did intimidate many youthful scholars. So it\u2019s better to remember him as a poet of great gifts. His lyricism inspired some of Britain\u2019s finest composers to set music to his verse, and his poetic melancholy continues to attract readers, some of them young. They all willingly overlook that Housman may not have gone to Shropshire until after A Shropshire Lad was published. But he\u2019s buried there, in Ludlow\u2019s churchyard, and a new cherry tree has been planted near his grave where, again this year, it will wear white for Eastertide. \u00a9.

[Stanley]

I've mailed Bob and drawn his attention to the coding which I do not know how to deal with....

[PanBiker]

I looks like they are formatting commands from a WP application which would normally be hidden. Depends what Bob uses I suppose.

[Stanley]

I have had a reply and he has no solution so it looks as though we'll have to endure it until it heals itself!

[PanBiker]

It could equally be at your end with a setting in your email client. I take it you copy and paste what Bob sends? I think you are with TalkTalk so you have a webmail option to cross check with via the TalkTalk website.

[Stanley]

Cars and ticking clocks.

Small things make perfection, but perfection is no small thing. Henry Royce.

“Rolls-Royce,” as a compound noun or adjective, signals high quality (often, high price) in a consumer good. In the last century it has been applied to pianos, perambulators, and Persian rugs. In 2006 it was even used to advertise an electric toaster—the four-slice De Longhi, if you’re curious. This suggests that the name, the ‘marque,’ was beginning to scrape the bottom of the proverbial barrel, but of course it all began with Rolls-Royce motor cars, autos of legendary quality. The Rolls-Royce was so silent on the road that you could hear its clock ticking, a 1950s advert claimed. The names given to R-R model lines underlined the point and descended down through the generations. Thus the 1906 ‘Silver Ghost’ became the 1955 ‘Silver Cloud’ and then the 1965 ‘Silver Shadow.’ So “branding” was important. In the firm’s beginning, that was the business of Charles Rolls, a rich young man who went into the partnership in 1906 and who presided at the company’s West End showroom. But Rolls’s fascination with speed proved fatal in 1910, when he died aged only 32 with the rare distinction of becoming the first air crash fatality in British history. Rolls left behind him the engineering half of the partnership, Henry Royce. Born on March 27, 1863, he was the much older partner, of much humbler origins. His father was a flour miller, but one whose ambitions outran his realities when Henry was a mere stripling. So Henry Royce left school and took to the streets, first as a newspaper boy and then running telegrams for the Post Office. This may have given Henry a taste for money (his delivery area was in London’s ‘rolls-roycy’ Mayfair neighborhood), but getting to ‘rich’ took many accidental turns. These began with an engineering apprenticeship at the Great Northern Railway, then a spell with a machine tool company. Royce moved on to help light London and Liverpool streets with electricity, which led in turn to a partnership making small generators for factories. This higgledy-piggledy career became a classic success story of English engineering when in 1903 Henry Royce bought a 10 horsepower French motor car, and decided that he could do a better job himself. The first Royce motor car hit the road in 1904. The ‘Silver Ghost’ came in 1906, as did Charles Rolls, that young man so in love with speed that he wanted to sell it. Rolls-Royce as a motor car marque has now passed to a German firm, BMW, but after Rolls’s early death Henry Royce took up an interest in aero engines. Today, the British firm of “Rolls-Royce” powers 15% of the world’s passenger jets and has plans to expand. But when a Rolls-Royce takes off today, you can’t hear a clock tick. ©

[PanBiker]

The codes are unicode for opening and closing single and double quotation marks. Was this received after your Thunderbird upgrade Stanley? If so you need to check on Webmail. If it's right there it's probably your client, if still wrong it must be at Bobs end.

[PanBiker]

Will put further comments in the Computer Agony thread. Worth pursuing.

[Stanley]

The confusions of Irish nationalism.

I will put a limit to any term of imprisonment you may impose \u2026 I shall be free, alive or dead, within a month. Terence MacSwiney, speech to the court, August 1920.

The short-lived (1879-1909) Royal University of Ireland was an odd place: indeed it wasn\u2019t a \u2018place;\u2019 rather it was a federation of colleges, designed to impart the sheen (and substance) of \u2018university\u2019 respectability to its graduates who had studied at one or another constituent college. So the fact that James Joyce and Eamon de Valera both had Royal University BAs, and nearly contemporaneously (Joyce 1902, de Valera 1904), is of no great significance. They had studied at very different Catholic colleges, and after their \u2018Royal\u2019 BAs ne\u2019er the twain should meet. But most of the Royal University\u2019s constituent schools were Catholic. Trinity Dublin and Queens Belfast held themselves aloof, each in its way a pillar of the Protestant establishment. The Royal, Irish and Catholic, existed in an era when Irish Catholics fought amongst themselves between continued subjection, home rule, and real independence. Its last Chancellor, Baron Castletown of the Irish peerage, embodied this split personality, an ardent imperialist and an eminent (British) soldier, Castletown also supported the study of Irish (Gaelic) culture and history, and may have sympathized with those graduates who disrupted the 1908 commencement to demonstrate in favor of making \u2018Irish\u2019 compulsory. That was the wish of the Royal University graduate, Terence MacSwiney (BA, 1907) who published poetry as MacEireann (\u2018Son of Erin\u2019) and in politics made himself into one of the heroes of Irish nationalism. Terence James MacSwiney came to his Royal University BA through Queen\u2019s College, Cork. He was born in Cork on March 28, 1879, into an aggressively Catholic family, prosperous at first but soon fallen on hard times. At home Terence heard tales of the Saxon invasion of Ireland. At school, he mastered the Irish language and became a passable poet. In Cork he joined nationalist societies, mostly of a cultural bent, and was first arrested for protesting the visit of King Edward VII. As founder and leader of the Cork Brigade of the Irish Volunteers, he held his unit back from the doomed Easter Rising of 1916, but continued his militant defiance through several imprisonments and became an active combatant in the Irish \u201cCivil War.\u201d He was found guilty of sedition and imprisoned in Brixton, London, where, in August 1920. he went on hunger strike. It may have been a gamble, but this hunger strike was his last. He died in October 1920. His widow, Muriel, would live to be 90, long enough for her to migrate leftwards into communism. Terence MacSwiney himself died young and as a martyr to Irish cultural nationalism. \u00a9

[PanBiker]

I see you are not using your other editor Stanley!

[Stanley]

I'm working under difficulties today or hadn't you noticed?

[Stanley]

There's a woman in the House!

You must give something to someone to be happier, especially when that gift is your own time and strength.   Frances Bolton.  
 
Modern American political history includes many wives who took up their dead husbands’ offices, mostly in the southern and western states, and usually (before the 1960s and 1970s) briefly.    1940 saw two exceptional wifely successors.   The more famous widow was Margaret Chase Smith of Maine (1897-1995), who served four further terms in the House of Representatives before her 24 years in the Senate.  The other was also a Republican, Frances Bolton, whose husband Chester Bolton died in late 1939, having finished less than half of his term.   Frances won a special election in 1940 as the first woman to represent any Ohio district, but then she won reelection fourteen times.   Her district, Ohio’s 22nd, comprised east Cleveland and the city’s wealthier suburbs, which would seem a challenge except that, in 1940, east Cleveland’s black voters were loyal Lincoln Republicans.   Frances became the oldest-ever female member of the House by listening to them all.  This may have been second nature.   Frances Bolton was born Frances Payne Bingham on March 29, 1885, and both family names, Payne and Bingham, we can read a lot of Ohio politics, mainly Democratic but with Republican admixture.  They also embodied a lot of Ohio money, mainly oil (John Rockefeller’s) but also steel.  Frances married Chester Bolton in 1907 when he was a bit of a johnny-come-lately in Cleveland.   But he’d gone on to Harvard, done well there socially and academically, and come back to a prosperous career as an attorney—and as a Republican.   In 1940, Frances Bolton took up where Chester had left off, opposing US entry into the World War, opposing lend-lease, opposing a military draft.   But she wasn’t an America-Firster.   She read history and read her constituency to become an internationalist, a strong supporter of the United Nations and of the post-war alliance system.   Along the way, Bolton welcomed Africa’s emerging nations, and we would be mistaken to see this as a politic nod to her black constituents.   Along with getting to know Africa, Frances Bolton in Congress would be a strong supporter of advancing African-American civil rights in the USA.   She’d already been there, having given $500,000 of her own money ($11 million today) to Case Western’s nursing program, and specifying that it was to be used for nursing student of whatever skin color.  In her private philanthropies, and in her public life, she was of an inclusionist temper.   She campaigned also for the integration (race and gender) of our armed forces.  Those who would today dismiss Frances Payne Bingham Bolton as a RINO (“Republican In Name Only”) ignore her biography and our history.   ©

[Stanley]

Moderation by necessity, or moderation as a virtue?

One is obligated to conduct his affairs with others in a gentle and pleasing manner.  Moses Maimonides, “Commentary on 'The Ethics of the Fathers.'”

There is every evidence that Moses Maimonides practiced what he preached.   In one sense, he was thus bowing to necessity.   Born in Muslim Spain (Cordoba, on March 30, 1138), he spent nearly the whole of his life (he died in Egypt in 1204) living as a faithful Jew in the empire of Islam.   But it would be a bad mistake to think of him as a person persecuted into being ‘gentle and pleasing.’   First of all, in his wanderings through the Islamic world, Maimonides always looked for (and usually found) places which practiced at least a degree of toleration.   Christian Europe, in his time, would have been a much more hazardous place for him as a Jewish philosopher, theologian, judge, and physician.    More importantly, his whole life was a study of moderation.   Maimonides came to the golden mean because he found God—omnipotent, omniscient, eternal—to be a very great Puzzle; in that face of that profound Riddle, no mere human could claim to come to anything like absolute certainty.  Far less to act on it.  Just so, Maimonides the jurist famously counseled that it would be better to let a thousand murderers live than to execute any one innocent person.   In this regard, too, it is well to think of the title of one of his greatest theological works, A Guide for the Perplexed.   The travels of Maimonides began in 1148 when Cordoba was taken over by the radical (and intolerant) Almohad dynasty.   Faced with a choice between conversion, death, or exile, his family (reasonably enough) chose exile, first Morocco, then Palestine, finally Egypt.   Along the way, young Moses came into contact with the Christian ‘crusader’ states, negotiating the release of Jewish hostages.   This may have helped him decide to stay in Egypt, where he became (among other things) the court physician to Sultan Saladin.   There he was entrusted with the care of Saladin’s son.   Today we’d say that Maimonides diagnosed depression, and acted as counselor, a very moderating approach to a disease then seen as diabolic possession.   As a physician ‘on the street’ Maimonides treated all sorts, of all religions, and so many that he exhausted himself.  The sultan also appointed Maimonides to be a ‘real’ “Moses,” as the Nagid  (or prince) of Egypt’s Jewish community.    In that role Maimonides produced his best theology, acting rabbinically as a guide to the perplexed.  But he had to be other things, for in his time rabbis were unpaid.  Beyond treating souls and bodies, Maimonides was a great scholar of the classical Greek tradition, scientist, mathematician, historian, physician, counselor, Nagid.    We could learn much from Moses Maimonides today, not least the reasonableness and utility of being gentle and pleasing—and puzzled.  ©.  

[Stanley]

'A horse, a horse! My empire for a horse.'

With a carbine in one hand and a whip in the other . . . Europeans must bear away in the name of civilization all these dregs of the human race.   Here the exploits of Cortez can still be repeated.   Nikolai Przhevalsky. 
   
By the Tsarist calendar, Nikolai Przhevalsky was born on March 31, 1839 (or, today, April 12), in the Smolensk district of Russia.  He was a son of a Polish aristocrat, eager for acceptance into the Russian elite.  Successful in that, he came to share several of the elite’s unlovely qualities, including a rampant racism.   He found the Tsarist army his best bet, and he died a colonel in 1888.   But it was an army full of colonels, and we wouldn’t know much about Przhevalsky but for two things.   First, he looked like Joseph Stalin (1878-1953).   During Stalin’s dictatorship, this led to a flurry of speculation that Przhevalsky might have fathered Stalin in a world-changing one-night stand.   Eventually, this resulted in a comic novel, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin by Vladimir Voinavich, a leading dissident of the late Soviet era who, to his credit, continued to be a stye in Putin’s eye—so it sounds well worth reading.   Secondly, more importantly, Nikolai Przhevalsky became a prominent player in Tsarist Russia’s expansion eastward.   As such, he’s a caricature of 19th-century imperialism, of almost any variety, European certainly but also American: our westwards expansion was, warts and all, not unlike Russia’s storm to the East..   In this, the Polish outsider Przhevasky made himself an insider.   He shared fully in imperial racism, finding useful inferiorities in all the peoples of Russia’s east, not only Mongolians and Chinese but a hodge-podge host of tribal peoples.  They all needed civilizing, and if they couldn’t accept it, then it would be OK to move them on or, if needs be, to kill them to make way for the fitter species.   But besides seeing humans as a hierarchy of species, some of fitter than others and thus fated to survive, Colonel Przhevalsky was, also, an indefatigable collector and classifier of species.   To conquer was to classify, and his name is now attached, in Linnaean Latin, to quite a number of species: plants, insects, reptiles, and mammals.  Well before the Stalinist era, Przhevalsky was honored for his scientific work even by the British (despite the Victorian “Great Game” of imperial competition with the Tsar).  But we can forget Przhevalsky’s likeness to Stalin, even his virulent racism, for he was also the naturalist who (re)discovered Przhevalsky’s Horse, a native of the Mongolian steppes.   It’s a charming beast, a Shetland with attitude, and it’s being reintroduced to its former homelands.   There is a dispute about whether it should be called Equus przewalskii or Equus ferus przewalskii, but that’s a scientific problem that will not be solved by the march of empires.   At least, I hope not.  ©   
 

[Stanley]

Pioneer of Wokeness.

One of my pet irritations today is the whole idea that the great interest and upsurge in books about black life has just come along.    Augusta Baker, 1969.  
 
Unsurprisingly, those culture-cancellers who would cleanse our school libraries of ‘woke’ books are behind the times: asleep, one might say, or perhaps just ignorant.  The search for a genuinely diverse children’s literature, one that might reflect the diversities of our population, began long while ago.   One of its greatest pioneers retired from her paid work in 1974 (that was four years before Ron DeSantis was born), but then in 1980 took up the post of Storyteller in Residence at the University of South Carolina.   There she had such an impact as to leave behind her a newly endowed professorial chair in information science (The Augusta Braxton Baker Chair) and a large collection of ‘woke’ children’s books.   Also in her memory, the university holds an annual storytelling conference called “The Baker’s Dozen: A Celebration of Stories.”   I note in passing that ‘celebration’ is a really good  collective noun for children’s stories.   The namesake of all this ‘woke’ activity was Augusta Braxton Baker, born in Baltimore on April 1, 1911.  Her parents were schoolteachers, and she was a good enough student to get her diploma at age 16 and win acceptance at the University of Pittsburgh.   There her studies were interrupted by marriage.  She and her husband then moved to New York, where she applied for the library science degree at Albany Teachers College.    Albany didn’t want to admit a black student, but it was a state institution and Augusta had the backing of the governor’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt.   So Augusta was admitted,  and in due course graduated.   After a few years’ teaching, which she didn’t enjoy, Augusta was hired as children’s librarian at New York Public Library’s Harlem branch.  It's now called the Countee Cullen Branch, and I suspect she had something to do with the renaming.  In any case it was there, in 1939, that she began her life’s work.   At first, she restricted herself to finding appropriate books for a reading population made up largely of black kids who, she felt, needed stories about black kids, about their families, about the lives they led.   She called it the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection.   Johnson had just died, and as a leading spirit of the Harlem Renaissance and the long-time president of the NAACP he made a good hero for Augusta’s young readers.   As her Harlem branch collection grew, so did her influence, not only in New York City (where she was eventually appointed suprema of the NYPL’s children’s division) but also in the nation, where Augusta was active in the children’s division of the American Library Association.   Now a prominent professional, an ‘authority,’ she influenced the market at source, by encouraging publishers to consider the works of writers and illustrators like Maurice Sendak and John Steptoe, whose successes depended on their appeal to a diverse market.   Nor did she restrict herself to books, becoming a consultant to “Sesame Street,” a new PBS television program whose main characters were decidedly non-racial and came in all colors under the sun.  It’s the sort of thing she would like.   Augusta Baker retired from her story-telling position at the University of South Carolina in 1994 and died in 1998, full of years and honors.   ©  

[Stanley]

I mailed Bob to tell him he has topped half a million with the page count, he has replied and is very pleased.