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editor
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 Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 10:31 am Post subject: |
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Canadian Geographic
Magazine Subscription
Undoing the Dew Line
Once the first line of defence against
a Soviet missile attack, 42 radar sites
across Arctic Canada were left
contaminated with oil, fuel and PCBs.
Why cleaning up those sites is costing
a fortune.
By Arthur Johnson
Photographs by Colin Rowe
March/April, 2007
| Quote: | When Lieutenant Colonel David Eagles, an environmental engineer with the Department of National Defence (DND), first went to the Arctic to inspect some of the sites in the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line — a network of military radar stations stretching along the Arctic coast from Alaska to Greenland — he was dismayed and outraged to see the evidence of disregard for the environment by the men who had worked there.
"They used to have barrel-rolling contests," he says. "They'd get these empty, or partly empty, fuel barrels and roll them down a hill to see how far they could go."
When they tired of the sport, they left the barrels to rust where they lay. What's more, personnel at many sites buried garbage all over the place. Sometimes the disposal of waste seemed planned to inflict the maximum damage on the environment.
"Why did they place garbage in several different dump sites?" asks Eagles, project manager of what has become one of the most extensive and expensive environmental cleanups ever undertaken in Canada. "And why did they put a garbage dump right beside the river?"
...The development of submarine-launched intercontintal ballistic muclear missiles rendered the DEW Line obsolete almost as soon as it was completed, and by the early 1960s, 21 intermediate sites had been decommissioned and transferred to Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC). Since INAC is responsible for lands in the North, it ended up with responsibility for the cleanup of the decomissioned sites. DND operated the remaining 21 Canadian sites until the DEW Line was officially shut down in 1993 and some of its stations merged with the new North Warning System. INAC is seven or eight years behind DND in the cleanup work, choosing to focus its resources on higher priority sites such as mines, which cause more environmental damage than DEW sites.
By 2012, when the last dime of DND's estimated $583 million has been spent, almost every trace of its 21 sites will have been wiped clean -- dismantled, buried or, in the case of the thousands of tonnes of contaminated soil, shipped outh to remediation plants in Ontario or Alberta.
Eagles has come to terms with the careless behavior of the DEW Line workers. "The world was a different place then," he says. "Environmental standards were different. Rolling barrels down a hill may be disgraceful to us, but for men who were thousands of miles away from their homes and families, it was entertainment." (-- pgs. 62-64) |
More Gambling Scientists.
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| Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 10:41 am Post subject: |
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The Poker Face of Wall Street
Hardcover
By Aaron Brown
| Quote: | At some time in the distant past, after the invention of language, two strangers who could communicate met for the first time. I don't know what they said, but two good guesses are "Wann bet?" or "Wanna swap?" Gambling and trading are two of the oldest human activities. In fact, some researchers trace these activities to animals, bacteria, and even single genes. Both of these activities involve risk, one of the most important and least understood puzzles life throws our way.
In premodern societies, gambling was the preferred way to make decisions when adequate facts were not available to make informed choices. Stone Age societies throw sticks, stones, or bones - or examine animal entrails - to decide where to hunt or whether to move on. The Bible and other ancient sources make frequent references to casting lots to determine God's will. (From Chapter 4, A Brief History of Risk Denial, at p. 75) |
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| Posted: Thu Apr 26, 2007 9:28 am Post subject: |
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The New York Times
Excessive, Complacent Bugler
Britain: Little Green Men Given Better Odds
By Agence France Presse
April 26/07
| Quote: | | British bookmakers slashed the odds on discovering extraterrestrial intelligence after astronomers announced Tuesday that that they had found an Earth-like planet 20 light-years away. Deciding to take less risk, William Hill cut its odds on proving the existence of extraterrestrial life from 1,000-to-1 to 100-to-1. For William Hill to pay out on an aliens bet, the prime minister has to confirm officially the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life and it has to be done within a year of the bet being placed. “We have come a cropper before, when, in the early 1960s we offered 1000-to-1 about man walking on the moon before 1970,” a spokesman said. |
More Outer Space Gambles.
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| Posted: Sun May 27, 2007 1:24 pm Post subject: |
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Laughing Gas
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
The Earl of Havershot and child actor Joey Cooley strike up an acquaintance while awaiting treatment at the office of two Hollywood dental surgeons:
| Quote: | Convinced now that no attempt was being made to jump his claim, the kid had become affability itself. Seeing in me no rival for first whack at the operating-chair, but merely a fellow human being up against the facts of life just as he was, he changed his tone to one of kindly interest.
"Does your tooth hurt?"
"Like the dickens."
"So does mine. Coo!"
"Coo here, too."
"Where does it seem to catch you most?"
"Pretty well all the way down to the toenails."
"Me, too. This tooth of mine is certainly fierce. Yessir!"
"So is mine."
"I'll bet mine's worse than yours."
"It couldn't be."
He made what he evidently considered a telling point.
"I'm having gas."
I came right back at him.
"So am I."
"I'll bet you don't."
"I'll bet you a trillion dollars I do." (From Chapter V, pgs. 57-58) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Sun May 27, 2007 1:37 pm Post subject: |
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Country Living
British Edition
Village Life with Sue Gaisford
The Fete Committee
May, 2007
| Quote: | | I was tempted to volunteer as Madame Petulengro with large earrings and a crystal ball, wishing glamorous adventures upon those who crossed my palm with silver, but common sense prevailed and a clairvoyant was decided upon. I'd be the human fruit-machine. This involves inviting people to pay 30p to pull down your right arm (ch-chung!), while three small children snatch a lemon, an orange or a grapefruit out of carrier bags. If all three choose the same fruit, the punter wins 50p. Irresistible, isn't it? (-- pg. 37) |
More Garden Gambles.
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| Posted: Sun May 27, 2007 2:37 pm Post subject: |
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The Globe and Mail
Report on Business
Newspaper Magazine Supplement
A Game of Risk
Lukas Lundin is betting the family business
on a breakneck expansion plan, high-stake
ventures into politically unstable regions and a
fervent hope the resource boom doesn't go bust.
His father would have been proud.
By Timothy Taylor
June, 2007
| Quote: | There is a story Lucas Lundin tells about how he and his brother Ian ended up running the family business, the Lundin Group of Companies, which includes the Fancouver-based Lundin Mining Corp. His father, Adolf, the Swedish oil and mining entrepreneur who passed away late last year, had taken the family ot the French Riviera for a holiday. He took his boys - Lukas was 12 at the time, Ian 10 - to a cafe for lunch. Over dessert, Adolf, who had only just begun his own entrepreneurial career in investments, looked across the table at his boys and announced that the time for a decision had come. "Which of you will be my mining engineer, and which of you will take care of the oil? You have 10 minutes."
... "He (Adolf) really went belly up," Lukas says, with a shake of the head. But with a small chuckle, too, as he is now able to really empathize with his father's position, understanding that in a business renowned for radical ups and downs, you must take the long view. "We had a fancy house on the lake in Geneva," he continues. "So we sold that. We moved into some farmhouse in France. My mother was a good sport, but it must have been very hard on him."
No guts, no glory, Adolf Lundin would have siad, citing his personal motto. Still, he might also have acknowledged that a little old-fashioned luck never hurt, either. That same year, returning to Geneva from Canada, Adolf had one of those life-changing encounters of which Hollywood screenwriters are so fond . Ahmed El Dib was the man's name.
They met at Paris's Orly airport and got to talking, the way two travellers do. It turned out Ahmed had just been let go by an oil exploration company called Basic Resources, and had the foresight to take an option on a Qatari oil concession as severance payment. Ahmed, Adolf learned, listening raptly in the departure lounge that day, was in the market for partners with the appetite for risk and some negotiating savvy.
And he had found one. Later that same year, Adolf nailed down the deal. Not easily, of course. The Emir of Qatar needed $1 million (U.S.) for his trouble, but the money couldn't merely be handed over directly. That would have been bribery and beneath the royal dignity.
"So my father bet the Emir that it would rain the next day," Lukas says. "Of course, it never rains in Qatar, so...the Emir got his million and Dad got the concession."
The project became Gulfstream Resources, which became the North Dome gas discovery in the Persian Gulf, which by 1979 represented $15 million worth of share value in Adolf Lundin's pocket. (-- pgs. 57-59) |
Yup and one more, too:
| Quote: | | ...(He (Lukas)'d started with the company (Musto Explorations) in 1977, going to Saskatchewan to stake uranium claims during his summer breaks from high school. "I was a terrible student," Lukas remembers. "My poor father." During his last year at school, he visited his brother in New Mexico - where Ian was working for another Lundin company - and had an epiphany. He wanted to quit school and enroll in the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. He bluffed his way in without a diploma, then, a year later, went back to his high school in Geneva and negotiated for the certificate retroactively on the strength of his good marks from first-year university. Like father, like son. (-- p. 59) |
More Gambling for Gold.
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| Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 12:10 pm Post subject: |
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The Economist
Magazine Subscription
The warlord and the spook
Russia's wars in Chechnya, which the
Kremlin says are over, have shaped
the country that Russians and the world
are now living with
June 2/07
| Quote: | Like a high-end barmitzvah, only with more weapons, the inauguration of Ramzan Kadyrov was held in a giant white marquee, in the grounds of one of his palaces, near the Chechen city of Gudermes. The guests - Russian officers who were once his enemies, rival warlords squirming in dress uniforms, muftis in lamskin hats - brought sycophantic portraits, cars and other gifts fit for a Caucasian potentate. As his pet lions gnawed on their bones outside, Chechnya's new president made a speech, as short and nervous as a schoolboy's, in which he vowed to continue the reconstruction of his wretched semi-autonomous Russian republic.
...As with all wars, the starkest toll of Chechnya's are the dead, who as well as the slaughtered Chechens officially include around 10,000 federal troops, and unofficially many more. Then there are the tens of thousands of injured, such as Dima, who lives with his parents in a grotty apartment on the outskirts of Moscow. In December 1999, Dima was shot in the chest in the village of Alkhan-Yurt. He heard the air rushing out of his lungs; then he was wounded again. He lay bleeding, eating snow, and preparing to die, but lived after a doctor bet his colleagues two bottles of vodka that he could be saved. Two pieces of shrapnel stayed in his back. "I lost my health forever when I was 20," says Dima, who was incapacitated for two years; terrible years, says his mother. Alkhan-Yurt, meanwhile, became infamous for the butchery and rape commnitted there by the Russians soon afterwards.
Still Dima, now at college, is relatively lucky. Many of the 1m-plus Chechnya veterans came back alcoholic, unemployable and anti-social, suffering what soon became known as "the Chechen syndrome." This widespread experience of army mistreatment and no-limits warfare has contributed to Russia's extraordinary level of violent crime: the murder rate is 20 times western Europe's. But the cruelty is also reproducing itself in a less well-known and more organised way.
As well as the army, thousands of policemen across Russia have served in Chechnya. Many return with disciplinary and psychological problems, says Tanya Lokshina of Demos, a human-rights group. They also bring back extreme tactics that they proceed to apply at home, such as the sorts of cordons and mass detentions deployed against peaceful protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg in April. Torture, concluded a recent report by Amnesty Internati.onal, is endemic among Russian police. It is often used to extract confessions, but not always: a survey by Russian researchers found that most victims of police violence thought it had been perpetrated for fun. (-- pgs. 55-57) |
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| Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 1:24 pm Post subject: |
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The World of Karl Pilkington
Hardcover
By Ricky Gervais
| Quote: | Ricky: I don't think nudists are just doing it because they are proud of their knobs.
Karl: No, but there's got to be a little bit of that in it, in't there? You know Jonathan Ross, right, and he's always happy getting his knob out, 'cos he's known to have this big knob, right.
Ricky: What do you mean, 'he's known?' Why is Jonathan Ross known to have this big knob?
Karl: No, he just talks about it a lot, doesn't he? He's always saying, 'Oh I bet you'd like this wouldn't you', and all that.
Steve (Merchant): But that's like me saying I'm known for being a great lover. I say it a lot, it's clearly not the case. What evidence have you got that he's got a big knob?
Karl: I saw it...Well, no, he did get it out but I wasn't looking...
Ricky: What do you mean 'You weren't looking'? How would you know it was out?
Karl: Just because he was sort of moving it about and that, and I could sort of see. No, I wasn't looking though. It was that sort of thing when you can see something moving about but you're like, 'I'm not looking at it."
Ricky: What, like an owl seeing a mouse?
(From 'No, no I was looking at another one.', at pgs. 180-181) |
The Office
DVD
Lotsa' loffs these days in Punterland, bless 'em. Our current fav in addition to Ricky, Steve and Karl:
Little Britain
DVD
The brainstorm of just two average punters.
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Sun Aug 12, 2007 9:57 am Post subject: |
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To a God Unknown
Paperback
By John Steinbeck
Also available on Audio Cassette
| Quote: | In Monterey there lived and worked a harness-maker and saddler named McGreggor, a furious philosopher, a Marxian for the sake of argument. Age had not softened his ferocious opinions, and he had left the gentle Utopia of Marx far behind. McGreggor had long deep wrinkles on his cheeks from constantly setting his jaw and pinching his mouth against the world. His eyes drooped with sullenness. He sued his neighbors for an infringement of his rights. He tried to browbeat his daughter Elizabeth and failed as miserably as he had with her mother, for Elizabeth set her mouth and held her opinions out of reach of his arguments by never stating them. It infuriated the old man to think that he could not blast her prejudices with his own because he did not know what they were.
Elizabeth was a pretty girl, and very determined. Her hair was fluffy, her nose small and her chin frirm from setting it against her father. It was in her eyes that her beauty lay, grey eyes set extremely far apart and lashed so thickly that they seemed to guard remote and preternatural knowledge. She was a tall girl; not thin, but lean with strength and taut with quick and nervous energy. Her father pointed out her faults, or rather faults he thought she had.
"You're like your mother," he said. "Your mind is closed. You have no single shred of reason. Everything you do is the way you feel about it. Take your mother, now, a highland woman and straight from home - her own father and mother believed in fairies, and when I put it up to her like a joke, she'd shoot her jaw and shut up her mouth like a window. And she'd say,'There's things that won't stand reason, but are so, just the same.' I'll take a wager your mother filled you with fairies before she died." (Opening paragraphs of chapter 7 at p. 33) |
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| Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2007 1:05 pm Post subject: |
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From the PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to ESL - Our Top Ten Picks:
| Quote: | More on the importance of this useful ESL tool and how to make the best use of it according to the leading ESL text for more than 30 years, Errors and Expectations.
|
Welcome to the Monkey House
By our dearly departed captain Kurt Vonnegut
Audio CD
Narrated by David Strathairn, Maria Tucci, Bill Irwin, Tony Roberts and Dylan Baker, all competent U.S. actors, though Roberts is the best, in our
view
Vonnegut's essay, New Dictionary, provides an excellent and amusing discourse on the subtle and not-so-subtle features distinguishing competing publications of this all-important text. One of the author's more scholarly pieces.
| Quote: | I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway's dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand. Mr. Hotchner, was it a frazzled wreck? My own is a tossed salad of instant coffee and tobacco crumbs and India paper, and anybody seeing it might fairly conclude that I ransack it hourly for a vocabulary like Arnold J. Toynbee’s. The truth is that I have broken its spine looking up the difference between principle and principal and how to spell cashmere. It is a dear leviathon left to me by my father – Webster’s New Dictionary of the English Language, based on the "International Dictionary" of 1890 and 1900. It doesn't have radar in it, or Wernher von Braun or sulfathiazole, but I know what they are. One time I actually took sulfathiazole.
And now I have this enormous and beautiful new bomb from Random House. I don’t mean bomb in any pejorative sense or in any dictionary sense for that matter. I mean that the book is heavy and pregnant and makes you think. One of the things it makes you think is that any gang of bright people with scads of money behind them can become appalling competitors in the American-unabridged-dictionary industry. They can make certain that they have all the words the other dictionaries have, then add words which have joined the language since the others were published, and then avoid mistakes that the others have caught particular hell for.
... When Mario Pei reviewed the savagely-bopped third revised edition of the "Merriam-Webster" for The Times in 1961, he complained of the "residual prudishness" which still excluded certain four-letter words, "despite their copious appearance in numerous works of contemporary 'literature' as well as on restroom walls." Random House has satisfied this complaint somewhat. They haven't included enough of the words to allow a Pakistani to decode Last Exit to Brooklyn, or Ulysses, either - but they have made brave beginnings, dealing wisely, I think, with the alimentary canal. I found only one abrupt verb for sexually congressing a woman, and we surely have Edward Albee to thank for its currency, though he gets no credit for it. The verb is hump, as in "hump the hostess."
If my emphasis on dirty words so early in this review seems childish, I can only reply that I, as a child, would never have started going through unabridged dictionaries if I hadn't suspected that there were dirty words hidden in there, where only grownups were supposed to find them. I always ended the searches feeling hot and stuffy inside, and looking at the queer illustrations - at the trammel wheel, the arbalest, and the dugong.
Of course, one dictionary is as good as another to most people, who use them for spellers and bet-settlers and accessories to crossword puzzles and Scrabble games. ... (From New Dictionary, Disc 4, read by Tony Roberts, pgs. 118-119 in the book) |
| Quote: | | Quote: | Last Exit to Brooklyn
DVD
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| Quote: | Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
DVD
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The authority for most writers:
| Quote: | The Oxford English Dictionary
The Compact Edition
Hardcover
The dictionary is the one tool of which even the most impecunious writer usually has two or three. |
Our own desk copy:
Concise Oxford Dictionary
| Quote: | Was Sam Johnson's the first English language dictionary? Wanna' bet?
|
Update 2007:
COUNTRY LIFE
Magazine Subscription
The First Dictionary
Eluned Price traces the life of a lexicographer
whose court case could have changed English
history.
Aug. 7/07
| Quote: | Robert Cawdrey was a country priest in the parish of Luffingham, Rutland, more than 400 years ago. A sleepy sinecure, you might think, where a pastor might enjoy a comfortable life. Not so Cawdrey. He was a dogged man of didactic zeal whose politico-religious beliefs culminated in a court case of enormous constitutional importance and left him without a living. If Cawdrey had won his case in 1591, the head of Charles I might not have rolled half a century later.
The story of Cawdrey has resurfaced because the Bodleian Library has republished A Table Alphabeticall, the title he gave to what is, in effect, the first English dictionary, with an introduction by John Simpson, current editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Printed in 1604, his Table precedes Bullokar (1606), Coles (1676) and other idols of lexicographers, before Dr Johnson boldly went where no man had gone before (1755) with the first comprehensive dictionary. ...
... Simpson describes him as a Puritan, but Cawdrey's attitudes, especially toward hierarchy, are typically Presbyterian. It is telling that it was the latter that Elizabeth perceived as a threat to the monarchy and the episcopacy.
Hauled up in 1587 before the Court of High Commission, the ecclesiastical court headed by the Bishop of London, Cawdrey stood trial for 10 weeks. ...
Cawdrey retaliated - in the law courts. The action he brought challenged the authority of the ecclastiastical commissioners and revolved around the legal right of the queen to empower them. This raised the question of the extent of her imperial prerogative: could it override statute and common law? In the end the judges decided that 'by the ancient laws of this realm, the kingdom of England is an absolute empier and monarch.' They upheld the divine right of the Crown and reaffirmed its theocratic imperium.
This landmark in constitutional law was the real importance of Cawdrey's case ... as had the judgment gone the other way, the monarchy would not have been an imperial sovereignty shouldered by divine right. Yet this was what James I relied upon, as did his son, Charles I, to catastrophic result. (-- p. 72) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2007 6:09 pm Post subject: |
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A Pocket Full of Rye
Hardcover
By Agatha Christie
| Quote: | "And the cause of death?"
"There will have to be an autopsy, naturally. Very interesting case. Very interesting indeed. Glad I was able to be in on it."
The professional gusto in Bernsadorff's rich tones told Inspector Neele one thing at least.
"I gather you don't think it was natural death," he said dryly.
"Not a dog's chance of it," said Dr. Bernsdorff robustly. "I'm speaking unofficially, of course," he added with belated caution.
"Of course. Of course. That's understood. He was poisoned?"
"Definitely. And what's more - this is quite unofficial, you understand - just between you and me - I'd be prepared to lay a bet on what the poison was."
"In-deed?"
"Taxine, my boy. Taxine."
"Taxine? Never heard of it."
"I know. Most unusual. Really delightfully unusual! I don't say I'd have spotted it myself if I hadn't had a case only three or four weeks ago. Couple of kids playing dolls' tea-parties - pulled berries off a yew tree and used them for tea."
"Is that what it is? Yew berries?"
"Berries or leaves. Highly poisonous. Taxine, of course, is the alkaloid. Don't think I've heard of a case where it was used deliberately. Really most interesting and unusual ... You've no idea, Neele, how tired one gets of the inevitable weed-killer. Taxine is a real treat. Of course, I may be wrong - don't quote me, for Heaven's sake - but I don't think so. Interesting for you, too, I should think. Varies the routine!" (-- p. 8) |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 9:55 am Post subject: |
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Yugoslavia (as it then was)
April Fool's Day
Hardcover
By Josip Novakovich
| Quote: | After a while, his fear dissipated. He took one skull with a hole in the pate and carried it home wrapped in newspapers like a watermelon. He hid the skull in the attic, imagining it would work as a ghost-receptacle. The executed man's ghost would visit what remained of his body and would perhaps come out of the skull at night to smoke cigars and sigh with sorrow.
In the evening, while visiting the skull, Ivan lit a cigarette butt he'd found in the gutter, and smoked and coughed. There was no sighing of the ghost, and Ivan felt brave indeed. Maybe there were no ghosts, only souls, and souls went away, to heaven or hell. What would happen in resurrection? He savored the mystery surrounding the skull.
Confident, he took a bet with several boys from his class that he could lie down on the tracks under a passing train. A quarter of an hour before the train was scheduled to pass, he went to the train station and checked the coaches for any metal objects that might hang from it and, finding none, he felt assured enough to lie down on the tracks.
When the train appeared around the curve, it struck him that another coach could have been added, with a metal hook hanging so low that it would crush his skull. He jumped off the tracks into the ditch a second before the train could reach him. The boys laughed at him. Ivan chased them because he hated appearing ridiculous, which made him look all the more ridiculous. (-- p. 5) |
An energetic if brutal stomp across the Balkans.
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| Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 10:48 am Post subject: |
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Uncle Fred in Springtime
Hardcover
The Autograph Edition
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | Few members of the Drones are at their brightest and alertest in the morning. There was a puzzled murmur. A Bean said, "What did he say?" and a Crumpet whispered, "The what Stakes?"
"I was explaining the how-you-do-it of the Hat Stakes to my friend Mr. Twistleton over there, and the Clothes Stakes are run on precisely the same principle. There is at the present moment a gentleman in the telephone booth along the corridor, and I have just taken the precaution to instruct a page-boy to shove a wedge under the door, thus ensuring that he will remain there and so accord you all ample leisure in which to place your wagers. Coo!" said Claude Pott, struck by an unpleasant idea. "Nobody's going to come along and let him out, are they?"
"Of course not!" cried his audience indignantly. The tought of anybody wantonly releasing a fellow member who had got stuck in the telephone booth, a thing that only happened once in a blue moon, was revolting to them.
"Then that's all right. Now then, gentlemen, the simple question you have to ask yourselves is - What is the gentleman in the telephone booth wearing? Or putting it another way - What's he got on? Hence the term Clothes Stakes. It might be one thing, or it might be another. He might be in his Sunday-go-to-meetings, or he might have been taking a dip int eh Serpentine and be in his little bathing suit. Or he may have joined the Salvation Army. To give you a lead, I am offering nine to four against Blue Serge, four to one Pin-Striped Grey Tweed, ten to one Golf Coat and Plus Fours, a hundred to six Gymnasium Vest and Running Shorts, twenty to one Court Dress as worn at Buckingham Palace, nine to four the field. And perhaps you, sir," said Mr. Pott, addressing an adjacent Egg, "would be good enough to officiate as my clerk."
"That doesn't mean I can't have a bit on?"
"By no means, sir. Follow the dictates of your heart and fear nothing." (-- pgs. 40-51) |
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Last edited by editor on Thu Jan 08, 2009 12:23 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2007 9:34 am Post subject: |
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Skin
and Other Stories
Hardcover
By Roald Dahl
| Quote: | The purser, small and fat and red, bent forward to listen. "What's the trouble, Mr. Botibol?"
"What I want to know is this." The man's face was anxious and the purser was watching it. "What I want to know is will the captain already have made his estimate on the day's run - you know for the auction pool? I mean before it began to get rough like this?"
The purser, who had prepared himself to receive a personal confidence, smiled and leaned back in his seat to relax his full belly. "I should say so - yes," he answered. He didn't bother to whisper his reply, although automatically he lowered his voice, as one does when answering a whisperer.
"About how long ago do you think he did it?"
"Some time this afternoon. He usually does it in the afternoon."
"About what time?"
"Oh, I don't know. Around four o'clock I should guess."
"Now tell me another thing. How does the captain decide which number it shall be? Does he take a lot of trouble over that?"
The purser looked at the anxious frowning face of Mr. Botibol and he smiled, knowing quite well what the man was driving at. "Well, you see, the captain has a little conference with the navigating officer, and they study the weather and a lot of other things, and then they make their estimate."
Mr. Botibol nodded, pondering this answer for a moment. Then he said, "Do you think the captain knew there was bad weather coming today?"
"I couldn't tell you," the purser replied. He was looking into the small black eyes of the other man, seeing the two single little specks of excitement dancing in their centers. "I really couldn't tell you, Mr. Botibol. I wouldn't know."
"If this gets any worse it might be worth buying some of the low numbers. What do you think?" The whispering was more urgent, more anxious now.
"Perhaps it will," the purser said. "I doubt whether the old man allowed for a really rough night. It was pretty calm this afternoon when he made his estimate."
The others at the table had become silent and were trying to hear, watching the purser with that intent, half-cocked, listening look that you can see at the racetrack when they are trying to overhear a trainer talking about his chance: the slightly open lips, the upstretched eyebrows, the head forward and cocked a little to one side - that desperately straining, self-hypnotized, listening look that comes to all of them when they are hearing something straight from the horse's mouth.
"Now suppose you were allowed to buy a number, which one would you choose today?" Mr. Botibol whispered.
"I don't know what the range is yet," the purser patiently answered. "They don't announce the range till the auction starts after dinner. And I'm really not very good at it anyway. I'm only the purser, you know." (From Dip in the Pool, at pgs. 131-133) |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2007 3:16 pm Post subject: |
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Company of Adventurers
Hardcover
Classic text on the history of Canada's
Hudson's Bay Trading Company
By Peter C. Newman
| Quote: | One whimsical example of how profoundly the two cultures differed enlivens a memoir by American painter George Catlin, who observed the behaviour of a group of Indians he guided through Paris in the early 1840s. The natives were not particularly overawed by large buildings nor wildly impressed by the carriages and litters; they managed to suppress any sign of enthusiasm for white women and retained their dignity even when pawed over by various impertinent royal personages assembled to inspect them - but they were utterly flabbergasted by the way Parisian women treated their dogs. The visitors were unable to understand the affection showered on the pooches when they had seen orphanages filled with unwanted children. They could not comprehend the horror on a saleswoman's face when they tried to buy the main course for a traditional dog feast. One of the Indian visitors carefully repoduced a table of Parisian dog-walking habits that ironically presaged later anthropological reports on North American Indians:
Women leading one little dog 432
Women leading two little dogs 71
Women leading three little dogs 5
Women with big dogs following (no string) 80
Women carrying little dogs 20
Women with little dogs in carriages 31
The French visit was followed by a tour of England by a dozen Chipewyan from the HBC territories in 1848. All but three died of pneumonia and English cooking.
... Quite apart from the sensual pleasures involved, HBC men who dallied with daughters of prominent Indian families gained a concentrated course in wilderness survival. Growing up in the relatively urban environment of the British Isles provided no training in snaring rabbits with willow twigs, readying raw furs for market or chewing tough moosehide into pliable moccasins. More important, these liaisons allowed the traders entry into Indian society; the women acted as interpreters and mentors, true partners in a relationship which, when it worked, went far beyond sexual congress. On the most elementary level, it provided HBC men with cheap scalp insurance. Through a simple ceremony à la façon du pays - an impromptu marriage without benefit of clergy - they took "country wives," acquiring personal security and the inestimably beneficial support system of the country wife's family. For their part, the women won access to the relative comforts of living year-round at or near the HBC forts; they gained social prominence and, usually, some form of special consideration for their relatives at the Company stores.
The Indian leaders perceived most of these live-in arrangements as advantageous, because their society operated along strong kinship lines and such semi-permanent partnerships extended family allegiances into the white man's valuable networks. The was, of course, not universally true, but it did happen often enough. Trading Captains calling at Company posts sometimes paid local factors the honour of offering their daughters in country marriages to forge blood-brotherhoods. At another level, living within the intimacy of these wilderness pairings was an ideal way to pass the long postings. The most effective traders were often the veterans of such tacit marriages. "About the only way you could learn the grunts and twists that go with most Indian talk is from a sleeping dictionary," inelegantly concluded a free trader named Andrew Garcia, who spent his life on the frontier.* |
| Quote: | Daughters of the Country
Hardcover
By Walter O'Meara
* According to Walter O'Meara's Daughters of the Country, two of Garcia's buddies settled in very direct fashion a feud over an Indian girl they both loved. The partners, known only as Fink and Carpenter, had been in the habit of demonstrating their trust in each other by filling a cup full of whisky and taking turns shooting it off each other's heads. To settle the love match, therefore, they decided to prove their good will by repeating their familiar performance. Fink won the coin toss for the first shot. "Hold your noodle steady, Carpenter," the gunman commanded, "and don't spill the whisky." A trigger squeeze later, Carpenter was stone dead with a bullet hole in his forehead. "Aw, shucks, Carpenter," Fink reproached his late partner, "you spilled the whisky." (From the chapter, A Savage Commerce, pgs. 185, 202-203) |
More about Newfoundland dialects.
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