George Emsden

An atrocity worse than the Holocaust?

George — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:46:03 +0000

Cancer cures going cheap

Blog pundits tell me that articles should be kept 400-800 words as people won’t read longer stuff. Well let me break this rule as the video is over an hour long, but I urge you to watch it all the same. Think of it as an online documentary, which it is. A few points from it:

Average cost of cancer treatment in the USA is US$50,000. As the saying goes there, if you haven’t got insurance, you can lose your home.
Natural substances can’t be patented so are not profitable for the big drug companies often known as Big Pharma. Natural remedies tend to be cheap but can’t be approved by Drug regulators such as the Food and Drug Administration so doctors can’t prescribe them. If you want these remedies you may have to go outside the USA e.g. Mexico.
Cures for cancer have been found and buried the American medical establishment for over a century. Doctors that have cured many people of cancer like Max Gerson (below) and Harry M Hoxsey have been vilified.

Big Pharma business is worth US$ 550 billion. It has tried to buy out previous cancer cures but the deals have collapsed when the cure discoverer has insisted that the drugs be freely available to people who need them.
There is a disturbing parallel with the tobacco industry aptly shown in the 1999 film The Insider

Has this touched a nerve? You bet! Last but not least, thanks to @EdelOMahoney for forwarding this to me via Twitter. And for professional advice on alternative treatments, you could start with Cancer Options

Is George overreacting here – feedback please?

The main heading by the way, comes from the video featured.

California’s oldest resident dies at age 111

George — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:56:16 +0000

Keeping her legs together and staying off the casting couch….

As the first of the baby boomers are retiring now, it is easy to think back on times when our parents were born and grandparents had their youth, as if they were very staid boring times. And strangely too, didn’t realise either that silent movies needed scripts as well as the “talkies”. Frederica Sagor Maas’s obituary shows that these times were anything but staid, reminding us of the era that used to be known as the Roaring Twenties. OK she worked in tinsel town where some things certainly haven’t changed, but as a window on an age when baby boomer parents were born, it is quite an eye opener.

Her death comes as modern audiences flock to the Academy Award-nominated The Artist to rediscover the “innocent charm” of silent film. According to Freddie Sagor Maas, however, the industry was hardly charming — and anything but innocent.

Her first screenplay was for The Plastic Age (1925), one of the defining films of the Jazz Age, which starred the red-headed Clara Bow as a promiscuous college flapper. Onscreen antics, however, were as nothing compared to what was going on behind the scenes.

At one of Clara Bow’s shindigs during the making of the film, and to the astonishment of Freddie Sagor Maas, the star “undressed and danced on the table nude. She had her bra off, her panties off. Everyone was stewed. It didn’t matter.” Then there were the orgies, described by Freddie Maas as more depressing than titillating, in which “disgusting men” cavorted with “desperate women”.

Though no prude, when she saw her own producer, Harry Rapf, and even the immaculate young Irving Thalberg, presiding genius at MGM, in the thick of one such bacchanal, Freddie Sagor Maas resolved to avoid such shenanigans out of a sense of “basic self-respect”.

As a comely brunette then in her 20s, however, this insistence on keeping her legs together and steering clear of the casting couch did not prove a wise career move. Instead, despite a string of screenwriting successes for Clara Bow, Freddie Sagor Maas soon found herself falling from favour with studio bosses.

She found that scripts and story ideas were often rewritten and screen credit given to the wrong person. Worse still, several of her ideas and stories were stolen outright by unscrupulous insiders. She had little redress. The Writers’ Guild was new and not powerful. Those who complained were marked as trouble.

When, for example, Freddie requested to be moved from the unit headed by Harry Rapf to one led by a different producer, Rapf sacked her for her presumption. “She’s a talented writer,” he conceded to his secretary as he dictated the memo of dismissal, “but she’s a troublemaker.” For good measure, Rapf struck her name from the credits on her new film The Waning Sex (1926), which she had created from scratch as a starring vehicle for her friend Norma Shearer. “It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t fair,” Freddie Sagor Maas wrote later, “but that was how Hollywood operated.”

Although Freddie Sagor Maas considered leaving Hollywood many times, it was only in 1950 that she decided to end her “insane” career. Looking back later she had a host of regrets: “If I had to do it again, I’d like never to have seen the motion picture business.”

Frederica Sagor was born on July 6 1900 in New York, the youngest daughter of Russian immigrants, and studied Journalism at Columbia University.

She set her sights on the burgeoning film industry and when she was only 22 landed a story editor’s job with Universal in New York. It was there that she came across The Plastic Age, a racy new novel by an English college professor, Percy Marks, which she offered to Preferred Pictures for $20,000. Preferred’s head of production, BP Schulberg, wired with the simple response: “Buy at once”.

Schulberg was one of the first Hollywood moguls whose advances she turned down, and in 1927 she married Ernest Maas, a writer and producer at Fox; the couple decided to work together as a writing team.

A script they wrote called Beefsteak Joe was, she claimed, “misappropriated” and made into the 1927 Paramount film directed by Victor Fleming called The Way of All Flesh (nothing to do with Samuel Butler’s novel of the same name).

None the less, the couple persevered, with scripts for Silk Legs (1927) and the Louise Brooks film Rolled Stockings (1927), as well as the Clara Bow vehicles It (1927) and Red Hair (1928). But soon Freddie and Ernest Maas found that their careers had stalled, and from the early 1930s they could get only rewrite work.

In 1941 Freddie and Ernest Maas tried another screenplay, Miss Pilgrim’s Progress, about the economic opportunities opening up to women after the invention of the typewriter. Unconvinced about such material, Darryl F Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, insisted on completely rewriting it as a light-hearted musical comedy for Betty Grable.

To the Maases’ delight The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947) proved a huge hit at the box-office. But they saw only a fraction of the profits. Nor could they find any takers for their next project, a film about the American Civil War which had taken them five years to develop, and as their money ran out they were forced to move in with friends. Another story idea, for a film about a medical fraud, also generated no interest. Then the FBI came calling with questions about the couple’s alleged communist sympathies.

Left of centre, but hardly revolutionaries, Freddie and Ernest Maas found themselves on a studio blacklist. Realising that they were both “washed up in the picture business”, they settled on a suicide pact.

The couple sat sobbing in their car with the engine running, a pipe from the exhaust wedged in the driver’s window. Suddenly, their folly became apparent. “What were we doing? Failure, disappointments, lack of money, humiliation — none of these things mattered,” Freddie Maas wrote later. “We had each other, and we were alive!” For the next 20 years, until her retirement in 1971, she worked as an insurance adjuster.

In 1999, almost half a century after leaving the movie business, Freddie Maas chronicled her unhappy experiences in The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood. With its caustic portraits of such figures as Louis B Mayer (“a pompous, power-mad, insensitive hypocrite”) and Irving Thalberg (“a Jewish mama’s boy”), and details of the pervasive sexism and chicanery in the industry, the memoir is now considered an important reference work on the early years of Hollywood.

Freddie Sagor Maas became the oldest living person in California. On her 110th birthday, she asked staff at her nursing home in San Diego for “a very large chocolate cake”. Her husband died in 1986, and there were no children.

On the shoulders of giants

George — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:34:44 +0000

“What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants“

While science was the subject of Isaac Newton’s above quote in a 1676 letter to his rival Robert Hooke [shown exactly as he wrote it] it could quite easily be applied to medicine in general and certainly to cancer. Cancer claimed a giant recently when Terry Hamblin passed away, a pioneer of stem cell research now considered by some to be the best long-term cure for cancer and certainly an alternative to the toxic drugs used in chemotherapy.

The three types of treatment for cancer have the nicknames: cut (surgery) burn (radio therapy) and poison (chemo therapy).

Hamblin’s stem cell treatment for lymphoma using the patient’s blood rather than drilling into bone marrow for example, is now a standard treatment and far less invasive.

Professor Terry Hamblin who has died age 68 was a haematologist who delivered the “world’s first cancer vaccine”

Hamblin injected Catherine Nosrati, a lymphoma patient who was then 42, with the so-called DNA “vaccine” at the Royal Bournemouth Hospital in 1999. In theory, the “vaccine” works by combining genetic material from a cancer cell with a harmless part of a toxin, thus stimulating the body’s immune system to destroy the toxin – and the cancer cell along with it. More than a decade after the first “vaccination”, trial programmes are still under way. According to an article in the International Journal of Medical Microbiology, “genetic immunisation with {DNA vaccines} has proven to be a promising tool in conferring protective immunity against tumours in various animal experiments”. Its effectiveness for humans, however, remains to be established.

Hamblin, known as “Prof” to his friends, dedicated most of his working life to leukaemia research, in particular chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL), the most common form of the disease. It had long been known that for about half of people with CLL, the disease grows and progresses slowly, and it may take years for symptoms to appear or for treatment to be needed. The other half have a more aggressive form of the disease and need treatment sooner. Hamblin and colleagues carried out DNA analysis and discovered that the disease indeed had two molecular forms, one giving patients an average of 25 years’ survival and the other, only eight years. As a result it became possible for clinicians to reassure many patients, especially older ones with the more slowly progressing form of the disease, that they would probably not need any treatment in their lifetimes.

In the early 1980s, Hamblin carried out the first successful “autologous” stem cell transplant into a lymphoma sufferer using stem cells from the patient’s blood. Previously, the procedure had involved taking stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow, an unpleasant and invasive procedure. The use of blood for stem cell transplants is now a standard procedure.

Terence John Hamblin was born in Worcester on March 12 1943 and studied Medicine at Bristol University. After a series of jobs in Bristol and Poole, Dorset, he was appointed Consultant Haematologist at the Royal Bournemouth Hospital in 1974 at the young age of 31.

At Bournemouth Hamblin and his colleagues developed a first class haematology service, and for about 30 years he travelled regularly to the Southampton Medical School, attending seminars, talking to academic scientists, and integrating scientific data. A professor at Southampton University from 1987, Hamblin became an expert in plasma exchange; myelodysplastic syndrome; monoclonal antibody therapy; stem cell transplantation; and chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.

He was also an honorary consultant haematologist at Kings College Hospital, London, editor-in-chief of the medical journal Leukaemia Research, and a regular columnist for the magazine World Medicine. His publications include Plasmapheresis and Plasma Exchange (1979); Immunological Investigation of Lymphoid Neoplasms (1983); Haematological Problems in the Elderly (1987); and Immunotherapy of Disease (1990) .

Perhaps unusually for a scientist, Hamblin was a devout Christian of fundamentalist views (among other things he was vice-president of the Biblical Creation Society and served as deacon of his local Baptist church). He kept a blog, in which commentary on the latest discoveries in cancer research alternated with thoughts on biblical texts. Yet he was sensitive to his audience and if the subject of the Bible came up in conversation with non-believer colleagues, he would address issues in a secular manner. [unusual for a fundamentalist]

He raised large sums for cancer research and in 2002 he was awarded the Binet-Rai medal for outstanding research in chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.

What on Earth is a Rab C Nesbitt Annuity?

George — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:29:50 +0000

Or what is an Annuity?

This is a question that comes up at every The Pensions Advisory Service TPAS presentation I give although the audience often doesn’t need to worry, as they are typically in public sector pension schemes where pension income is protected from the daily changes of annuity rates. An annuity is where you swap a lump of money for a guaranteed income – usually for life. For most people the lump of money comes from their pension which is usually the largest lump of money most of us will ever have. I use the word guaranteed here as the income is usually provided by a very large insurance company. These monsters are heavily regulated, can provide risk cover cheaply for ordinary people. Competition is ferocious, many rates have come down (not just on car insurance) and clever chaps called actuaries crunch numbers to assure everyone that there is enough money in the kitty to meet claims.

Got a young child with a penchant for maths? Have a look at becoming an actuary - they tend to be very well paid, but then the exams are tough. Forget also the old joke “What sort of guy becomes an actuary?” Someone who finds accountancy too interesting!

But back to annuities – an income for life in return for a capital sum. The government used to sell them until 1837, without any underwriting or medical checks. You may remember from the end of the 1994 film The Madness of King George the baddie played by Ian Holm is paid off after “curing” the King, and a major part of his settlement is an annuity.

Proving that you learn something every day, there is even an Annuity Museum a visit to which, would be interesting for any financial adviser. But there is a problem with annuities. Returns are based on two main factors: life expectancy and medium-term interest rates. Feeling brave? Check your own life expectancy with the Government Actuary Department GAD. Better healthcare means we are living longer meaning lower annuity rates while interest rates have also been low for a while which has the same effect. Annuity rates are less than half of those available ten years ago. Even worse, the difference between what you get swapping your capital for an income for life and what you could get giving it to an IFA who would select an income fund(s) that would allow you to keep your capital, is often only 1 or 2 per cent. As one of my fellow IFAs put it once, Annuities are Theft!

But life expectancy rates vary hugely throughout the UK, so let Ian Cowie in today’s The Daily Telegraph Your Money explain:

Never mind Scottish devolution, a Rab C Nesbitt annuity could boost your pension income

Scottish independence is getting the politicians excited again but most people north of the border could gain more from evolution than devolution. Before my mother and father disown me, I had better explain that I have just been looking at life expectancy statistics – and they make dismal reading for folk who will celebrate Burns Night next Wednesday.

For example, the average man living in Glasgow City will die 13 years and six months younger than his counterparts in Kensington & Chelsea, according to the Office for National Statistics. While medical advances, improved diet and less smoking mean more people across Britain are living longer, the gap between lifespans for different groups of the population is growing, according to new analysis by the Longevity Science Advisory Panel released this week.

The main factor, of course, is money; the rich tend to live longer than the poor. Steven Baxter of Club Vita actuaries – the professional mathematicians who advise pension funds – pointed out that these facts had important implications for people entering retirement.

He said: “People living in different parts of the United Kingdom should take different steps to get best value for their pension savings when they retire. The reason is because of the way insurers allow for differences in life expectancy between different socioeconomic groups by regions in their annuity prices.”

An annuity is a guaranteed income for life, which most members of defined contribution or money purchase pensions buy when they retire. Those who live longest do best but those who die sooner never get their capital back.

So, for example, Mr Baxter said: “People living in the South West, the West Midlands and Yorkshire & Humber, which all have above-average life expectancy, may find buying an annuity attractive but people living in Wales and Scotland, with below-average life expectancy, may find income drawdown more attractive than buying an annuity.”

Life companies have recognised these facts by adjusting most of the annuity yields they offer to reflect the purchaser’s postcode, among other factors. Smokers, for example, are paid higher yields because they are likely to die sooner and collect fewer annuity payments. Non-smokers and residents of well-to-do areas are offered less because they tend to live longer and collect more.

So might it be worth buying or renting a bedsit in Glasgow and taking up smoking before buying an income for life? Professional advisers were divided about what might be called the Rab C Nesbitt annuity. Bob Bullivant of Annuity Direct said: “This would probably work for someone owning two properties as they will need to provide identification for money laundering purposes.

“Such people should get a quote for each postcode. Renting a bedsit is more difficult in terms of identification.”

Life insurers have only themselves to blame if people begin to make the most of different incomes being paid to pensioners in different parts of the country, according to Steve Bee of Paradigm Pensions. He said: “The trend to so-called postcode annuities is worrying.

“If postcode annuity pricing is used as a blunt instrument and people can as a result gain an advantage by moving home in order to purchase one at a better rate, then the maths underlying the pricing of the annuities simply wouldn’t stand up.”

Billy Mackay of self-invested personal pension (SIPPS) specialists A J Bell said: “I have had a look at a selection of annuity application forms and I am not convinced there is a robust argument to be made for renting a place in the hope it will enhance the annuity figure.

“Any pension saver providing a rental address with the aim of inflating their income would run a significant risk of a subsequent reduction in the annuity amount.”

Alan Steel, an independent financial adviser of Linlithgow, said: “Annuity providers always ask if you smoke, but not when you started smoking, and there could be a similar opportunity for people with second properties.

“If you take up smoking and move to Glasgow before buying an annuity, you could be laughing all the way to the bank. But turning up in a string vest with a tin of Irn-Bru would be going too far.”

Pensioners planning to make the most of postcode annuities should always seek independent financial advice. If you think life is unfair, just look at the facts and figures about death.

Silicon Valley? Just another ghetto

George — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:27:00 +0000

Opposites Attract – but Likes cluster

First meeting of 2012 of George’s favourite networking group 3Cs Community is another humdinger hosted again by Simmons & Simmons at their City Point Office. Few minutes of listening to first speaker Andrew Humphries of Tech City and you wonder where the recession went. Styling itself as The Digital Capital of Europe, sleepy run down old Shoreditch is now bursting with media & tech businesses. Silicon Roundabout is probably the best known landmark

just above decaying Old Street station on the Bank branch of the Northern Line. Laptops make hotdesking the norm rather than the exception and the reason is perfectly logical. Businesses like to be able to meet/network/chat with like, even if they are competitors. Very useful too if you feel you can do a better job than your current employer is doing and want to branch out on your own.

The City of London is home to over 500 banks from all over the world, notable for much of its life for light regulation and is a legacy of Empire. Silicon Valley in California is a cold war legacy from US$billions spent by the US Department of Defense with the likes of Fairchild Semiconductor an ancestor of Intel

Not only do people like to meet within a cluster but clusters like to talk with each other, a major part of Andrew’s job. Shoreditch seems to get on best with its New York cluster but there are plenty of others around the globe with Berlin, Barcelona, Stockholm and Austin, Texas being mentioned. Thriving businesses attract other service businesses too. Interestingly, old warehouse-type buildings with lots of natural light through their huge windows and high ceilings, are ideal for creative businesses or as they might prefer to be called digital creatives.

Disruptive Charity

Haven’t watched Dragons’ Den for a while but one of the guys there used to make a point that his area was Disruptive Technology a term first coined in 1997. Disruptive charity is a little puzzling until some rather plain facts are put on the table by second speaker Chris Coghlan of Grow Movement For example, the average cost of an aid worker from the UK is £115,000 a year which covers the cost of 4 people including interpreter, driver, vehicle etc. Passing the management decisions down the chain with local managers from the area or country concerned, cuts the cost to about one thirtieth plus implementation is quicker and more effective. Only committed volunteers are kept on and people who do not maintain their effort are fired, never mind that they have a high-powered job on Wall Street.

Much of the aid is given in the form of basic business skills, illustrated by an amusing example of a small shopkeeper in Uganda. With its tiny 2 metre frontage, the guy sold DVDs and insect repellent. While he liked selling DVDs, he was considering giving up the insect repellent, as it wasn’t quite as cool as selling trendy DVDs. Simple analysis showed that the insect repellent was profitable while the DVDs sold at a loss.

Grow Movement’s activities are directed at the bottom 1 billion of poorest people in Africa, a sector largely ignored by other large aid agencies. Together with micro finance, it can create jobs very cheaply, raising the living standards of several people for each job created. Follow them on twitter @growmovement.

Big Brother is watching you

Quite a few people know that the UK is the most CCTV-observed nation on the planet, but still scary when third speaker Nick Pelling of Nanodome points out that 20 per cent of all the CCTV cameras in the world are in the UK! Describing himself as a contrarian tech entrepreneur, Nick points out that most CCTV cameras have lots of moving parts, last 18 months on average and are often placed in inaccessible locations. Reduce the number of moving parts to One, letting software do much of the work, and you have cameras that can last Ten years.

Next 3Cs meetings 6th March and 8th May and if you know anyone who wants to pitch, please get in touch.

Fire Down Below

George — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 14:10:20 +0000

We Shall Not Remember Them

First full week of the new year and nearly everyone is back at work. Only three weeks after the festivities and several weeks since Remembrance Sunday, the official time of year to be sad and think back. But not everyone is remembered and certainly not all with gratitude, reminding us of the words from Laurence Binyon’s For the Fallen

Age shall not weary them,

nor the years condemn.

David Day’s story brings me up short as he was one of thousands of what were called Bevin’s Boys whose contribution to the war effort was only officially recognised in 2008 - one of few things that Gordon Brown will be fondly remembered for, I suspect – but I digress. Wind the clock back to WW2, and many of the miners have joined up leaving a critical gap in coal production. No North Sea Oil in those days and coal is used for heating, power, transport and armaments. Ernest Bevin appointed by Winston Churchill as Minister of Labour in 1940, is a brilliant organiser and has the brainwave of replacing the missing miners with young lads chosen by ballot.

48,000 of them end up working down the mines, many of them from middle-class families who lived miles away from where the mines were. Hailed as a wonderful social experiment it was a failure, as Day’s book The Bevin Boy (The Echoes of War) states very clearly. The experiment did raise coal production but was only possible with The Emergency Powers (Defence Act)

Disturbing the Universe

If the Bevin Boys were the only forgotten heroes of WW2 perhaps one could leave things there but another scandal still rancours and has not been resolved, nor I suspect (again) ever will be. Some of the highest casualties in WW2 were in Bomber Command The (official) figures are eyewatering. Out of 125,000 Bomber Command personnel: 55,500 killed (44%) Total casualties 73,741 (58%). It gets worse. Hidden in another book which deals with this era: Freeman Dyson’s autobiography Disturbing the Universe is another story.

Many of the pilots in Bomber Command are between 18 an 20. As if flying over enemy territory is not bad enough, getting the planes in the air isn’t easy either. You are about to take off in a heavily laden bomber. Up to about 40 knots, the plane is basically a ground vehicle and the controls will only start giving aerodynamic control above that speed. Add in a nasty cross wind or some inconvenient gusts with perhaps a sticky wheel bearing or brake and accidents happen. No time to complain, there’s a war on and to cap it all, the powers that be in the RAF keep raising the take off weights making the planes even more difficult to fly. No mamby pamby Post Traumatic Street Disorder stuff in those days, and some of the guys couldn’t take it – they cracked up.

But with a war on, you simply can’t have people thinking that too many of the combatants are cowards (something the Bevin Boys were accused of). A euphemism is invented L M F or Lack of Moral Fibre. In modern day parlance, a WIMP, so if the guy had a breakdown, it was his fault!

We won the War!

1945 the soldiers come home and get a demob suit as a start in civilian life again. Campaign and other medals are awarded but no Campaign Medal for the heroes of Bomber Command. Bomber Harris Chief of Bomber Command is so angry that he refuses the offer of a peerage and only later accepts a Baronetcy when Winston Churchill insists. The lack of RAF bombing accuracy in WW2 that led to area bombing was probably the main reason for this. No excuse for bombing inaccuracy these days, where modern technology allows us to put a bomb through a window several hundred miles away, the target coordinates being obtained by satellite.

So let me bring this full circle and finish with David Day’s Obituary, that prompted this rant.

***********************************************************

David Day, who has died aged 85, was one of the thousands of “Bevin Boys” conscripted to work in the coal mines in the later years of the Second World War, and afterwards wrote a book about his experiences.

David Day as a Bevin Boy

He dropped his guard once, in the run-up to the 1945 general election, when he spoke out in favour of Winston Churchill, a hate figure in the mines for his role in the General Strike of 1926, when he was reported to have suggested that machine guns be used on the strikers: “After a shocked silence one of the men cried, ‘Why, you’re nothing but a bloody Tory’, as if this were an impossibility down a coal mine. Henceforth any reference to me was preceded by ‘that Tory so-and-so’.”

Above ground, things were not much better. Though most, including Day, would have preferred to go into the Armed Forces, they faced jibes of cowardice and were “curtly treated by many people such as shop assistants or bus conductresses, who made it pretty clear that they thought we were shirkers”. Nor, Day recalled, did the Bevin Boys (who had a reputation for Bolshiness and frequent absenteeism) ever receive encouragement from the country’s leaders, one MP describing them as “not worth the trouble”. When the war ended they received no official recognition to match the medals awarded to returning soldiers.

In 1993, Day and 10 other surviving Bevin Boys returned to Littleton Colliery to mark the 50th anniversary of the scheme, but a month later it was announced that the colliery — the last working pit in Cannock Chase — was to be closed. In a foreword to the second edition of his book, Day wrote: “In describing my personal experiences as a Bevin Boy I seem inadvertently to have also recorded an underground life that has now gone forever.”

The youngest of six children, David Day was born at Evesham on September 2 1926 and educated at Prince Henry’s High School. After leaving school he joined the Evesham Journal as a cub reporter in 1942.

In The Bevin Boy, Day recalled that his chief ambition, before he was conscripted to work in the mines, had been to get away from Evesham. When he returned home in 1947, however, it felt like “paradise”. He returned to the Evesham Journal, where he worked as the paper’s district reporter in the North Cotswolds for 36 years until he took early retirement, writing two books about his adventures as a journalist, All Over The Wold (1998) and The Duck Pond Affair Etc (2005).

During his retirement Day worked part-time at Cotswold district council’s heritage centre in Northleach, and as clerk of Bourton-on-the-Hill parish council.

He never married and died from cancer in a Sue Ryder Care Home.

David Day, born September 2 1926, died November 25 2011

Nomoreirishjokes please

George — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:25:45 +0000

No More Irish jokes please!

Giving my age away here, but comedian Charlie Chester (1914-1997) said humour is “really about cruelty!” Might even have seen him say it on B&W TV but the point is, we usually laugh at somebody. All very well but it depends which end of it you are. Let me restrain myself and stick to one mother-in-law joke:

“I can always tell when the mother in law’s coming to stay… the mice start throwing themselves on the traps.” Les Dawson (who else?)

but running a close second must be Irish jokes where I will do the same:

Reilly was in court, charged with armed robbery. The jury foreman comes out and announces, “Not guilty.” “That’s grand!” shouts Reilly. “Does that mean I can keep the money?”

raising the question, who do they make fun of? [The English?] Canadians mock their folk from Newfoundland:

“You know you’re from Newfoundland when you owe more money on your snowmobile than your car!”

I’m with stupid (see link bleow)

In the RAF, pilots make fun of navigators:

“What do you do when you see your navigator walking towards you holding a pin? Run like hell, as he probably has a grenade in his other hand!”

who occasionally retalliate Be pleased to hear of other examples, preferably with links – use the Comments box below.

And if you do public speaking, you may be aware that the only person you can safely makes fun of, is yourself.

You cannot be serious!

And the reason for George’s venture into humour? Something very serious and profound, namely Melvin Bragg’s wonderful 5 part series on The Written World on BBC Radio 4 While writing may be thousands of years old, starting with the Sumerian civilisation in what is now Southern Iraq, books written or printed on paper are much more recent. Books as we know them were probably invented by the Romans about 100 BC. Printing was invented by the Chinese 600 years before Gutenberg. Paper was also invented by the Chinese in 105 A.D. spreading to Persia and later to Europe. Strangely, the word paper comes from the reed plant papyrus where the Egyptians first used it for writing, first with a brush and later with a pen.

But back to the Irish. The Romans introduce Latin, wine and other aspects of their culture into Britain, arriving in 43 A.D. and leaving 410 A.D. During their time here, Christianity comes to the British Isles and spreads to Scotland and Ireland. In the latter case, St Patrick is not the first, but certainly the most famous missionary.

When the Romans leave, Christianity survives in Ireland and Scotland but starts to disappear in England and St Aidan starts to reintroduce it, travelling from Iona and ending up in Lindisfarne in 635 A.D.

But Ireland was never part of the Roman Empire so while the Irish see Christian books, they never hear spoken Latin, the Roman’s language. At this time, books or rather manuscripts are handwritten by scribes and there are no spacesbetweenthewords. Not a problem if you hear Latin spoken and can ask someone, but very difficult if you have never heard Latin. To make reading the written word easier, someone has the idea of a space between each word – a rare case perhaps where dumbing down achieves something positive.

And if you are still thinking “So what!” have a look at these website addresses courtesy of QI

www.whorepresents.com www.expertsexchange.com www.therapistfinder.com www.penisland.net www.speedofart.com www.powergenitalia.com

But with the 31 January 2012 deadline for filing UK tax returns fast approaching and much higher penalties now, let leave you with some humour - as I started. Here I have in mind our hard pressed accountants, some of whom have only taken one day off over Christmas. Research for this blog brings up the weirdest tax ever, namely the urine tax introduced by Roman emperors Vespasian and Nero. Hope the Coalition doesn’t get any ideas.

Catch up with The Written World with BBC iPlayer

(Who Represents) (Experts Exchange) (Therapist Finder) (Pen Island) (Speed Of Art) (Power Gen Italia)

Before Starbucks

George — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:18:14 +0000

Starbucks nearly ended up being called Pequod..

Taking its name from the first mate in the story of Moby Dick written by Herman Melville , the world’s largest coffee chain now has over 16,000 stores worldwide. Prior to this, coffee bars were typically individual or family businesses where the most famous included Café Hawelka in Vienna and Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore in Paris.

Café Hawelka was notably famous for its Buchteln, a sweet dumpling originally filled with plum jam but now in many variations.

Café de Flore means the flower café while Les Deux Magots takes its name from a popular play in the early 1800s Les Deux Magots de la Chine (Two Figurines from China) when it sold silk lingerie rather than coffee.

All three cafés were popular with artistic/philosopher/writer types. Viennese patrons included Henry and Arthur Miller, Andy Warhol and the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

The Parisian patrons included Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Ernest Hemingway all of which were Nobel Prize winners – prompting the thought, what did they put in the coffee?

But something rings a bell. Thought there was a famous Zimmerman café in Vienna? Turns out there is a famous one in southern Europe - but it’s in Leipzig as any fan of composer J S Bach would know.

And finally, the intriguing obituary of Leopold Hawelka that prompted this blog.

Leopold Hawelka, who has died aged 100, founded, with his wife Josefine, Vienna’s celebrated Café Hawelka, an institution once described as the city’s answer to Paris’s Deux Magots.

Photo: APA 7:24PM GMT 30 Dec 2011

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Founded on the central Dorotheergasse in 1939, Café Hawelka became – after the war – the favourite haunt of the angry young men of the Fantastic Realist school of Viennese painting Regular patrons from overseas – Henry and Arthur Miller, Andy Warhol, the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt – came to swap ideas, drink strong Viennese coffee and indulge themselves with a plate of Josefine’s famous Buchteln, a type of Bohemian dumpling served with plum jam.

In the café’s smoky gloom, dog-eared posters of long-forgotten art exhibitions jostled for wall space with nicotine-stained photographs of 1950s operetta stars and matinee idols, graffitied messages and the odd sketch left by some impoverished artist in exchange for a cup of coffee. Waiters in shabby tuxedos, precariously balancing multiple silver trays, would weave a path through a jumble of sagging sofas and worn marble tables scarred with cigarette burns, under the ever-watchful eyes of the Hawelkas.

Leopold, trim, bow-tied and dapper, would supervise the café until the afternoon and, until her death in 2005, Josefine would take over until the early hours of the morning.

In later years, inevitably, the café became something of a tourist destination. But the Hawelkas were never tempted to update; Leopold’s sole concession to modernity was the installation of an espresso machine.

Leopold Hawelka was born on April 11 1911, the son of a Bohemian cobbler from Mistelbach in Lower Austria. When he was 14 the family moved to Vienna where found work at Deierl, one of the best restaurants of the pre-war period. There he met Josefine Danzberger, the daughter of a butcher. They married in 1936 and opened their first café, Kaffee Alt Wien, on the Bäckerstrasse two days after their honeymoon.

As there was little money, they slept on the floor among the beer barrels and it was at this time that they established the “shift” routine that would last until Josefine’s death. By all accounts the marriage was a happy one. In an interview given a few years before his wife’s death, Leopold said: “The most important thing for a landlord is to have a competent wife, and Mrs Hawelka, she is unique.”

In 1939 the rent at the Alt Wien went up and in June they decided to move to a former café in Dorotheergasse which they opened as the Cafe Hawelka. A year later, Leopold was called up into the Wehrmacht and the café was forced to close. He returned five years later, having somehow survived Stalingrad unscathed.

In the immediate post-war period, when Vienna was split into Soviet, American, British and French zones, the Café Hawelka was one of the few buildings in central Vienna that still had glass in its windows. Because of its proximity to the Chancellor’s palace in the Ballhaus-Platz, it also had electricity, so the Hawelkas were able to reopen in the winter of 1945.

Some of their best stories stretched back to the immediate post-war years when, attracted by the smoke curling out of the café’s stovepipe, ragged Viennese citizens would crowd into the establishment and, over a free glass of water, escape the cold of their bombed-out homes. Leopold recalled getting up before dawn, walking for two hours to the Vienna Woods and trudging back with sacks of firewood to keep the stove burning.

It was a period when Austrian royals pawned priceless carpets, paintings and other family treasures . “They needed money as badly as the rest of us,” Josefine recalled. While the Hawelkas struggled to find food to serve, one regular customer, a Soviet officer, brought his own lunch, which consisted of thick slices of ham which he wolfed down in front of hundreds of pairs of hungry eyes.

Josefine and Leopold Hawelka ran their café for 60 years together until she died aged 91. It was subsequently managed by their son and grandson, but Leopold continued to spend the occasional morning watching over the waiters and left no one in any doubt who was really in charge when he did drop by.

Leopold Hawelka is survived by a son and daughter.

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The comments at the end of the Daily Telegraph obituary (see link above) are interesting.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

George — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 10:13:12 +0000

Frank Wild – A Forgotten hero

Just when you think you have written the perfect blog to wrap up the year you stumble across another article that is too good to pass over but thinking about the subject, it makes a good one to kick off 2012 with. And if Grytviken sounds familiar, think of it as the fuse that started the Falklands War in 1982, about which now there is a fun facts site.

The main heading is of course, from the book by James Agee and the article below by Karen Bowerman (from) Antarctica in BBC News Magazine .

Frank Wild in final journey out of Shackleton’s shadow

Frank Wild was the right-hand man to Sir Ernest Shackleton, joining him on several of his Antarctic expeditions. But is he finally stepping out of the great explorer’s shadow, as his ashes make a poignant journey south?

Almost 100 years ago, the famous polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton set out to try to be the first to cross Antarctica.

He failed, but his ill-fated expedition on the Endurance, which began in 1914, is now seen as one of history’s greatest stories of survival and leadership.

But while much has been written about Shackleton, his second-in-command on that voyage, a Yorkshireman called Frank Wild, has been largely overlooked by history. At least, until now.

Wild’s relatives recently accompanied him on his final journey to Antarctica, as they took his ashes to South Georgia to rest next to the grave of Shackleton, the man he affectionately referred to as “the boss”.

Ernest Shackleton profile

The 18-day voyage retraced the disastrous Endurance expedition and ended in a final reunion of two great polar explorers.

The two men shared several trips to Antarctica, including the Nimrod expedition in 1907-09 which brought them to within 100 miles of the South Pole, a record at the time.

But within weeks of setting sail in early 1915, the Endurance was trapped in ice and 10 months later it was crushed, a moment recounted by Wild in his recently re-published polar memoirs.

“It was a sickening sensation to feel the decks breaking up under one’s feet, the great beams bending and snapping with a noise of heavy gun fire…

“Shackleton was on the lookout platform and everybody else in the tents when we heard him shout, ‘She’s going boys!’

Frank Wild (far left) with Sir Ernest Shackleton (second left) and crew aboard the Nimrod

“Running out, we were just in time to see the stern of the Endurance rise and then a quick dive and all was over… I felt as if I had lost an old friend.”

Among those on board the Akademik Ioffe, the former Russian research vessel retracing the voyage, was Alexandra Shackleton, who spoke touchingly about the relationship between her famous grandfather and Frank Wild.

“My grandfather was once asked to describe various members of his expedition team, and he was quite rude about some of them.

“But he said: ‘There is nothing to say about Frank Wild, he is my other self.’”

Shackleton’s crew haul a lifeboat after their ship, Endurance, breaks up

Wild’s relatives, Julie George and Brian and Martin Francis, described their great uncle as a small man, about 5ft 4in (1.65m) with piercing blue eyes and an expansive chest.

Frank Wild’s adventures

1873: John Robert Francis Wild born in Skelton-in-Cleveland, N Yorkshire, the eldest of 13
1901-4: Part of Robert Scott’s Discovery Expedition to Antarctica, as was Shackleton
1907-9: Nimrod Expedition with Shackleton comes within 100 miles of South Pole – a record
1911: Aurora expedition to Antarctica
1914-16: Second-in-command on Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, stranded for four months on Elephant Island
1916: Returns to UK and volunteers for duty in World War I, serving in Royal Navy
1921-22: Assumes leadership of Shackleton-Rowett Expedition after Shackleton dies of a heart attack in South Georgia

He was also a great disciplinarian, with a good baritone voice and a love of music. His favourite sea shanty was “What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor?” and he introduced the family to the song’s rude verses as well.

Wild’s love of music was to serve him well when the Endurance ran into trouble. Having retrieved a banjo, and smuggled out a bottle of whisky from their sinking ship, he organised concerts – complete with liquid refreshment – to try to keep the crew’s spirits up when they were forced to camp on the ice.

But faced with such extreme conditions, morale did not remain high for long. Cracks appeared in the camp and the ice began to melt. The men realised they had no choice but to take to the sea in lifeboats in the hope of making it to Elephant Island, off the coast of Antarctica, across some of the most dangerous seas in the world.

Frank Wild and 21 crew were stranded on Elephant Island

From the deck of the Akademik Ioffe, Elephant Island looks savage – a row of snow-covered peaks rising perpendicularly out of the sea. It is too rough to land, which provides a sober reminder of the dangers Shackleton’s men faced in lifeboats nearly 100 years ago.

But somehow they made it. After Shackleton and five crew members set off to seek rescue, Wild was left in charge of 21 men in temperatures as low as -45C (-49F). [GE trivia: at -40 degrees, the temperature reads the same on both the Fahrenheit and Centigrade scales]

Relatives of Frank Wild and Sir Ernest Shackleton returned to Antarctica on the Akademik Ioffe

They lived under two upturned boats and their meals consisted of raw seals and seaweed.

Shackleton managed to make it to South Georgia, a journey of around 800 miles.

But he landed on the wrong side of the island and was forced to scale a mountain range, that no-one had ever climbed before, to get to a whaling station at Stromness – all in the hope that someone would be there.

Dogs barked and children ran away, says Alexandra Shackleton. The whalers knew Shackleton but did not recognise him because he was so thin and his face had been blackened by the seal blubber the crew had used as fuel for a makeshift stove.

“When the manager realised who he was, he turned away and wept. Everyone had assumed the expedition members had died.”

Shackleton returned to rescue Wild and his men – although it did take him four attempts.

Grytviken on the island of South Georgia is where Frank Wild and Sir Ernest Shackleton are now buried, side by side. It was Wild’s wish to be laid to rest alongside Shackleton and seven years ago a plan to fulfil that hope began to take shape.

Shackleton’s Life after the Antarctic

1922: Marries Vera Altman in Reading, UK, but they start new life in Africa, divorce six years later
1920s: Drifts between South Africa, Rhodesia and Swaziland, where he worked as a barman
1931: Marries Beatrice Rowbotham and works in a gold mine, and lectures about his Antarctic expeditions to help make ends meet
1939: Dies of pneumonia in South Africa

Angie Butler, author of The Quest for Frank Wild, discovered his ashes in South Africa, where he was a farmer after World War I, and made it her mission to bring them “home”. This made the Wild family trip to South Georgia possible.

Shackleton’s grave is in one of the most desolate places in the world, the disused whaling station of Grytviken.

It is marked by a massive slab of granite and lies in a small whalers’ cemetery surrounded by a white picket fence – to keep the seals and penguins out. The whaling station resembles a scrap metal yard, full of disintegrating buildings and whaling boats that have been left to rust on the shingle shore.

Butler hands the casket symbolically to Julie George who places it in the ground.

Frank Wild’s great niece, Julie George, buries Wild’s ashes in Grytviken, South Georgia. Wild’s granite ledger reads: “Frank Wild, 19 April 1873 – 19 August 1939, Shackleton’s right-hand man.”

As the two great explorers are reunited for a final time, the ship’s horn sounds, echoing across the bay below.

While all the other graves in the cemetery point east, Shackleton’s and Wild’s look south, to Antarctica where, on the Akademik Ioffe a few days later, the towering, blue icebergs form a lake of glinting ice sculptures. In the distance, there is a rumble as a tiny fragment of a massive glacier tumbles into the sea.

This is a place where man has no real influence, [GE Italics] where nature takes its course, and where, when we go ashore, ours will be the only footprints.

“Once you have been to the white unknown, you can never escape the call of the little voices,” wrote Wild.

I know now what he meant. I think I can hear those little voices too.

For those of you interested in the exploits of the likes of Ernest Shackleton and Frank Wild, you might wish to start with the James Caird Society

Welcome to 2012

Crossing Continents is on on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday, 29 December at 11:00 GMT and on Monday, 2 January at 20:30 GMT. Listen again via the BBC iPlayer by downloading the podcast.

Misery we would not inflict on a terrorist

George — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:41:38 +0000

Physician heal thyself – or maybe not?

It is easy to forget that doctors get ill too, as mentioned in this thought provoking review from Slashdot Will this start another debate about funding the NHS, I wonder? The review mentions “futile care” which in the USA, tends to be paid for by insurance companies. Being privately funded, the doctors have an incentive to treat/cut/prescribe more as they earn more that way. And if you haven’t got insurance and need a major operation? You can lose your home.

For all its faults, the NHS has much to commend it.

How Doctors die by Ken Murray

“Dr. Ken Murray, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC, writes that doctors don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about doctors is not how much treatment they get when faced with death themselves, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves because they know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want.

‘Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people,’ writes Murray. ‘What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.”‘ Feeding into the problem are unrealistic expectations of what doctors can accomplish. Many people think of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation CPR as a reliable lifesaver when, in fact, the results are usually poor. If a patient suffers from severe illness, old age, or a terminal disease, the odds of a good outcome from CPR are infinitesimal, while the odds of suffering are overwhelming.”

This could be a follow on from an earlier book:

If you are describing your symptoms to a doctor, you have an average of 18 seconds before you get interrupted. Something to keep in mind next time you visit your GP.