Fragile Bird

Happy birthday, Spocky!

Some of you might remember that about a year ago I had mentioned seeing an episode of Digging for Britain where a team goes off to look at a bunch of sunken ships, but I couldn’t recall the date of the maritime disaster. They talked about a large fleet of slave trading ships sailing down to Africa where they went to trade and pick up slaves, but got delayed, then sailed across to the US colonies to drop off the slaves and to pick up trade goods, got seriously delayed again, and so instead of making the crossing back in September they hit the rough storms of November and a huge number sank. It was very frustrating to troll through various maritime topics on Wikipedia but not be able to figure out the event. Well, I suspect I found the event by accident. I’ve been listening to the complete set of Hamish Macbeth murder mysteries and the author regularly refers to some of the wild weather of the highlands, at one point saying “like the great storm of 1703”. Out of curiosity I looked it up and I bet that was the Digging for Britain storm that sank all those ships. The storm is suspected to have been a mere, and I use mere advisedly, Category 2 hurricane that hit Great Britain in November with terrible loss of life and caused enormous damage. Ships sank all over the coast, with thousands of sailors losing their lives. An estimated 8,000 to 15,000 people died, but some say the number could have been as high as 30,000. And typical storm damage was done, but in a country unprepared for hurricanes. According to Wikipedia in London alone 2,000 chimneys collapsed, killing many people. The bishop and his wife in Wells died when the chimney collapsed on them while in bed. Queen Anne had to shelter in the basement of St. Jame’s palace because of structural damage done to the roof and chimneys. 4,000 oak trees came down in the New Forest alone, and thousands of people drowned in parts of the country that are prone to flooding. One ship was found 15 miles inland. Funny thing is, I’ve read a lot of English novels over the years and I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel where this storm played a role in the plot. You’d think someone would have written a novel where such a huge disaster was at the very least mentioned in passing.

Anyone ever make a dish with rice, pork and apricots? I was reading a murder mystery and one of the characters talked about his dinner. He just said a “chop” slow cooked with rice and apricots. Sounded good.

I just looked up that story. The police regret the words, but the cop’s not a media expert. A person approaches a pro-Palestine rally wearing a yarmulke, what do you think his motivation was? Maybe he didn’t want to set himself on fire, but wanted to commit suicide in another manner. Ok, the officer perhaps should have said “I’m afraid you might provoke a negative reaction because of the what you are wearing”, he shouldn’t have been so blunt.

@Zorral my laugh at your post is a deeply cynical one.

I used to go out with a guy who was a senior executive at a big mining company. He was visiting a mine in Indonesia, I think, or maybe Papua New Guinea, and the visitor quarters at the mine were grass huts on stilts. The walls were made of some kind of wood, bamboo maybe, that had bark on it and the wood had turned grey as wood will do. He was lying in bed reading a report late at night and caught something moving out of the corner of his eye, and grabbed the report and smashed it against the wall. There was a giant spider creepy crawling up the wall by the bed, and by giant, he said, he meant it was the size of dinner plate. If it had bit him it wouldn’t have killed him but he would have been very, very sick. The spider was the same grey as the wood and was more or less invisible against the wall. He also had a story about being in Australia (after a visit to Papua New Guinea) meeting with company executives in Sydney. One of them had a dinner party at his house for the visitors. The house was not too far from downtown Sydney, and was up on stilts with the parking under the house, and had a nice verandah overlooking the large backyard. The couple had small children, and my friend commented to the wife that he was surprised there was no play area in the backyard, swings or a slide, like you’d see in Canada. Ah, she said, the problem was the pythons, they had lost a couple of dogs to them and they didn’t allow the kids to play in the yard. I’m already nervous about spiders and snakes, thank you very much.

Years ago, maybe in the 1970s or 80s, there was a lawyer at a big law firm in downtown Toronto in one of the fancy bank towers. The banks in Canada do really well and they all built snazzy headquarters. The offices pretty well all have floor to ceiling windows. Someone visiting the lawyer asked if he wasn’t nervous about the window. I think the guy liked to lean his chair against it. “Oh no,” he said, “the windows are very safe, you can bounce yourself against them and it’s perfectly safe, I do it all the time!” Then he demonstrated to the visitor, and bounced his body against the window, and the window cracked and he fell 20 stories or whatever to his death. True story. I made sure never to lean against a window in an office tower after that.

Well, I guess that soldier who set himself on fire to protest US support for Israel has in fact influenced someone else, just not other US soldiers.

Yes, I saw your previous post a few weeks ago. I was just trying to come up with an alternative.

Maybe he has cancer?

This is really something very small but there is a post on Facebook about the fact the main actors for the Duncan and the Egg series that is going to be filmed have been cast, and Duncan is going to be played by a former footballer who has started an acting career by the name of Peter Claffey. He’s so new he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. I asked the question so how tall is he, since I couldn’t find the answer anywhere (about 6’5”) and I just saw my question got a “like” by…Sean Bean. I think it’s the real Sean Bean, but who knows for sure, his identity could have been appropriated. But I am inordinately pleased.

I think this is an very accurate statement, though to clarify it for some you might have to explain that “plunder it from others” means people in other countries and “plunder it from ourselves” means people in our own countries. You may have been too nuanced.

Exactly what crossed my mind!

A story just popped up on Google saying that in Trump’s trial jury selection two corporate lawyers have been picked out of the 7 chosen so far. That could get really interesting. Traditionally lawyers are not chosen for juries.

I think there’ are such deep Protestant roots in the UK that the concept of “spare the rod, spoil the child” will never go away. It was certainly ingrained into a very Calvinist Ontario here in Canada. Blame Samuel Butler for adding the “spoil the child” idea to biblical proverbs that talked about parents who didn’t discipline their children were doing no favors. Just out of curiosity I looked up the original poem by Butler: ”What medicine else can cure the fits Of lovers when they lose their wits? Love is a boy by poets styled Then spare the rod and spoil the child” The Bible verses that get quoted as justification for hitting children talk about discipline with both “rod and reprimand”.. Examples, “whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them”. And “a rod and a reprimand impart wisdom, but a child left undisciplined disgraces its mother”. The problem is of course the fact that people can be brutal and lack common sense. We know that, sadly.