Monday, November 12, 2007

Ninety years ago


In November, 1917, the Canadian artillery battery that includes gunner Harry Whitfield Mollins has advanced into Belgium from northwestern France. In his November 9 diary page, he indicates that his unit is billeted in a building--instead of in dugouts near the guns--quite a distance from "the position" where the battery's big cannon are based.

He describes the depressing area and his grim feelings in the two days before his birthday. Friday, November 9: "This is an awful, desolate looking country. It is all torn up by shell fire. There are several tanks lying around out of action."

Then:

Saturday, November 10, 1917 Weather: Rain

Left the billets this morning at 7.30 for the guns. Arrived at 9 oclock. We were firing steadily nearly all day. "Fritz" [the German artillery] dropped some around pretty close & made us take cover several times. Raining all day. The mud is something fierce. All the shell holes are full of water. I am wet thru & coated with mud. Am disgusted with everything. Shall be glad when tomorrow morning comes. There is a steady stream of traffic on this road & the road is lined with dead horses and mules.

--

Sunday, November 11, 1917 Weather: Showers
Were relieved this morning at 9 A.M. Was never so thankful for anything in my life. Was wet thru & coated with mud from head to foot. Returned to billets & turned in for a sleep. Stayed in bed all day. We fired 240 rounds during our twenty-four hours duty This is my twenty-second birthday. Spent my last birthday in England and the one before that in Canada. Where shall I spend the next? I hope in Canada.
#

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Winter's a-comin', goldarnit!


On this day, our seven-eleven (7-11-07), Torontonians awoke to Celsian zero-zone weather--sub-freezing with the wind-chill factor--while snow-coloured clouds hung menacingly over our front-yard Maple, ironically still richly clad in golden leaves.

It made one think of Ezra Pound's variant rewrite of the Olde English song "Svmer is icumen in Lhude sing cuccu!"

You may recall that Pound put his parodic song this way:

Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.

Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,

So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.
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Thursday, October 18, 2007

Dehyphenation

A Reuters report Sept. 21 told of the dehyphenization of about 16,000 expressions in the newly published Shorter Oxford Dictionary's Sixth Edition.

Some formerly hyphenated expressions lose their Oxford hyphen—e.g., hobby horse, ice cream and test tube; others become one word, such as bumblebee, crybaby and lowlife.

The report appropriately prompted e-discussions, one of them started by Reuter alumnus Charles Frankel, who lives in the U.S.A., and including a current Reuterian Julie as well as Reutalumnus me, cm 10-10-07:

From: Charles, Monday, October 1, 2007 Subject: hyphens

Carl, When my wife's father died in the late 1960s, we inherited his third edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. It has been a goldmine (gold-mine?) of information since; I consult it frequently. I will not be buying the sixth edition but I appreciate the articles on the disappearing hyphen. I still write "teen-age" with a hyphen because, at one time in my career, I was told teenage was some kind of fodder. I use a hyphen when it is useful.

But I do not know whether to describe the United States as fuckedup, fucked-up or fucked up. Whatever the answer, this country of mine is in a mess. --Chuck
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From: Carl, Fri, 05 Oct 2007 (amended 10 Oct 2007)

Chuck: My Concise Oxford is more modern than your third edition (1934), being a "Fourth Edition, 1951, Reprinted (with revised addenda) 1956." Its dark-blue (darkblue? dark blue?), cloth binding held together for many years with Scotch tape.

I also possess the so-called
Shorter Oxford Dictionary, the two-volume word bible, a 1986 Reprint (“With Corrections”) of the 1944 Third Edition. It is a 2,700-page abridgement of the 15,000-page, primary Oxford Dictionary of 1879. It took seven Oxford U. abbreviators and three Leeds U. helpers 30 years to put together the first Shorter edition of 1933. (I acquired my Shorter 20 years ago at a bookshop sale in Maidstone, Kent, for 40 pounds/$100 Cdn.)

By the way, my
Shorter gives 15 lines of definitions and usages of fuck, remarking of that word that it was "Until recently regarded as a taboo-word [now a tabooword?] and rarely recorded in print." It hyphenates "fuck-up. A mess. muddle."

My 50-year-old
Concise Oxford has fuck all to say about fuck. --cm 5-10-07

- - - - - -

From: Chuck Saturday, October 6, 2007
Subject: Re: hyphens C O R R E C T I ON

Carl, Sorry, I got mixed up with "Concise" and "Shorter." I have the "Shorter"; make of that what you can. The cover of the first of my two volumes also is held together by Scotch tape. Perhaps we could make a fortune by figuring how we could stick hyphens to prefixes and suffixes.

My wife drives me somewhat crazy by using a single hyphen when she should use two of them for a dash - but no one is perfect. –Chuck


- - - - - -

From: Agnes, Tuesday, October 9, 2007
To: Carl, Chuck Subject: Re: hyphens

What about your Canadian Oxford Dictionary? What does it say? Agnes

- - - - - - - - -

From: Chuck To: Agnes Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Agnes: It depends on how the Canadian dictionary pronounces a-bout. – Chuck

- - - - - - - - - -

From: Carl, Wed. 05 Oct 2007
Agnes and Chuck:

Good call, Agnes. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary of 1998, Editor-in-Chief Katharine Barber, 1,730 pages (Canadian English: 250 Years in the Making), may well be the bellwether in the Internetera dehyphenization movement, nine years ahead of the new Shorter.

Take a look, for example, at
Canadian Oxford verbiage that precede Shorter’s changes: —e.g., hobby horse, ice cream, test tube and such combos as bumblebee, crybaby and lowlife.

By the way, there is yet another
Oxford dictionary hereabout (hereabout/hereabouts one word in all four of our Oxfordicts) -- namely, the encyclopedic Oxford Reference Dictionary, 1986, 994 pages. It’s a bit preWeb passé with its hobby-horse, ice-cream and test-tube along with bumble-bee, cry-baby and (no lowlifes allowed) leap-frog.

Chuck: As for the F-word, or is it Fword, its aforementioned absence from the Concise Oxford and a sparse 15 lines in the Shorter, the OxReference allows a meagre 5-1/2 lines, including your unhyphenated “fuck up—to mess.”

It gets down to this: The
Canadian Oxford wins on the F-front handsdown, so to speak. It does fuck up in hyphenating the noun fuck-up (“a mess or disastrously bungled matter,” or “a person who is a chronic loser or failure”).

But it does provide a compendiously Canadian 18 usages as verb, noun, adverb, adjective and general expletive—including politely defining “fuckhead” as “a person considered with contempt.”
--cm 10-10-09 #

From: Carl Thu, 11Oct 2007

This discussion of hyphens-or-not and Oxford dictionaries is in danger of becoming overdone, overworked and overwrought (all three over-words appear hyphenlessly in olden Oxfords).

Nevertheless, two important corrections are necessary:

First:

In referring Oct. 10 to Oxford dictionaries retained in this home, I cited four--the Concise, the Shorter, the Reference and the Canadian. Even while reporting that, a fifth rested before my eyes, a finger-reach from this iBook computer.

It is The Little Oxford Dictionary, a long-ago gift from my mother, its clothbound 638 pages little enough to fit into a trouser pocket. It is the dictionary I mainly use to check a spelling or a meaning. First published in 1930, mine is a 1951 reprint (“with Corrections and Revised Addenda”) of the 1944 Third Edition.

Just as the current Shorter Oxford editors accept the impact of Internet lingo in making their changes, the Little Oxford’s preface cites such influences of its time as “the wider spread of American books and journals; of cinema captions and of the new power of wireless. . . .”

Still, the Little one hyphenates bumble-bee, hobby-horse and ice-cream. There is no crybaby nor cry-baby, no test tube nor test-tube. It makes no mention of lowlife, although there is a citation of “lowbrow (slang) unintellectual.”

Perhaps with that in mind, there’s not an F-word to be seen.

- - - - - - -

Second:

In naming the Editor-in Chief of the Canadian Oxford, I misspelled her first name.

It’s Katherine, not Katharine, Barber—a blasphemous typographical error in identifying a renowned Canadian lexicographer, despite her having been born closer to Cambridge than Oxford. (see following).
Apologetically, cm 11-10-07

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http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca/cgi-bin/cw2w3.cgi?p=banfield&t=42205&d=757
Katherine Patricia Mary BARBER
BARBER, Katherine Patricia Mary, B.A., M.A.; lexicographer; b. Ely, Cambridgeshire, England 1959; e. Univ.of Winnipeg B.A. 1980, B.A. (Hons.) 1986; Univ. of Ottawa M.A. 1990; EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, CANADIAN DICTIONARIES, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS CANADA 1991-- ; Lecturer, Sch. of Translation & Interpretation, Univ. of Ottawa 1984-91; Rsch. Assoc., Bilingual Cdn. Dictionary, Univ. of Ottawa 1989-91; Roman Catholic; Mem., Euralex (Eur. Assn. for Lexicography); Dictionary Soc. of N. Am.; Am. Dialect Soc.; Office: Don Mills, Ont. –Canadian Who’s Who 1997

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Barber
Katherine Barber From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Katherine Patricia Mary Barber (born 1959) is a Canadian lexicographer and Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

Born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, England, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree University of Winnipeg in 1980 and a Master of Arts from the University of Ottawa in 1990. From 1984 to 1991, she was a lecturer in the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa. From 1989 to 1991, she was a research associate with the Bilingual Canadian Dictionary project at the University of Ottawa. In 1991, she was Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Dictionaries for the Oxford University Press in Canada.

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http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/702-6634910-8188051?%5Fencoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-ca&field-author=Katherine%20Barber
Books "Katherine Barber" Showing 1 - 12 of 18 Results
1. Canadian Oxford Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - Jun 30 2004)
2. Canadian A to Z of Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation by Katherine Barber (Paperback Feb 2006)
3. Paperback Oxford Canadian Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Paperback - Mar 2006)
4. Only in Canada You Say: A Treasury of Canadian Language by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - Mar 15 2007)
5. Canadian Oxford Dictionary of Current English by Katherine Barber, Robert Pontisso,and Tom Howell (Paperback - May 2005)
6. Student's Oxford Canadian Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - Aug 8 2007)
7. Oxford Canadian Thesaurus of Current English by Katherine Barber, Robert Pontisso, and Heather Fitzgerald (Paperback - Oct 2006)
8. Six Words You Never Knew Had Something To Do With Pigs: and Other Fascinating Facts about the Language from Canada's Word Lady by Katherine Barber (Paperback – Mar 07)
9. Compact Oxford Canadian Dictionary by Katherine Barber, Robert Pontisso, and Heather Fitzgerald (Hardcover - Nov 2006)
10. Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do with Pigs: and Other Fascinating Facts about the Language from Canada's Word Lady by Katherine Barber (Hrdcvr - Mar06)
11. Student's Oxford Canadian Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - May 2004)
12. Concise Canadian Oxford Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - Oct 2005)


- - - - - - - -

Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on

By Simon Rabinovitch

LONDON, Sept 21, 2007 (Reuters Life!) - About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.

And if you've got a problem with that, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).

The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.

"People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for," said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.

Another factor in the hyphen's demise is designers' distaste for its ungainly horizontal bulk between words.

"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

The team that compiled the Shorter OED, a two-volume tome despite its name, only committed the grammatical amputations after exhaustive research.

"The whole process of changing the spelling of words in the dictionary is all based on our analysis of evidence of language, it's not just what we think looks better," Stevenson said.

Researchers examined a corpus of more than 2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, Web sites and blogs from the year 2000 onwards.

For the most part, the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns, which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into two (e.g. test tube).

But hyphens have not lost their place altogether. The Shorter OED editor commended their first-rate service rendered to English in the form of compound adjectives, much like the one in the middle of this sentence.

"There are places where a hyphen is necessary," Stevenson said. "Because you can certainly start to get real ambiguity."

Twenty-odd people came to the party, he said. Or was it twenty odd people?
- - - - - - - -
Some of the 16,000 hyphenation changes in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition:

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:
fig leaf hobby horse ice cream pin money pot belly test tube water bed
- - - -
Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:
bumblebee chickpea crybaby leapfrog logjam lowlife pigeonhole waterborne #

Sunday, September 9, 2007

TIFFrant and rooms

Here in Toronto, our local news media are deluging us with pix and word by print and talk with TIFFrant--more than plenty about the annual Toronto International Film Festival.
But a funny thing elsewhere: Overnight foreign radio shows in English from Europe were wordless re the start of TIFF, preoccupied instead by the windup Saturday of the 64th annual Venice Film Festival.

And the only TIFFref found in the Sunday NY Times was almost all about an unfinished new hotel near Hazelton Lane in the Yorkville neighborhood which has somehow ranked itself as Toronto's, if not Canada's, first five-star hotel. The ranking took place even before it existed, hailed as such months ago by signs on its construction hoardings.

One can only guess its top ranking is based on its tiptop roomrates, which the Times says start at $405 a night and others report (see below) range from $475 to $850 a night for a room, suites renting for $2,500 and $5,000 a night.

It's somewhere to bear in mind when next you're visiting T.O. or, if you live here, when friends and kin too numerous to fit into your abode are visiting.
-cm 9-9-07


THE HAZELTON HOTEL: FILMFEST HOT SPOT
NY Sunday Times September 9, 2007
Travel Section COMINGS AND GOINGS
Toronto Hotel to Be Film Hot Spot for a While
By Hilary Howard

With its $2 million worth of technology, Italian leather seating and mohair-lined walls, the private screening room at the Hazelton Hotel in Toronto, which opened last month, is already booked through the Toronto Film Festival (Sept. 6 to 15), playing host to five to seven screenings a day.

The 77-room luxury property, above, in the trendy Yorkville neighborhood, is definitely going after the high-end market, with nightly rates starting at 405 Canadian dollars ($392, at 1.07 Canadian dollars to the U.S. dollar).

Amenities include Bulgari toiletries in the bathroom, 300-thread-count Mascioni linens on the beds, a spa with four treatment rooms, and a lap pool with imported mosaic tiles. Information: www.thehazeltonhotel.com . #

Sunday, September 2, 2007

Maspilling

In case you missed, thought you-all in the J-game, past or present, might be amused and/or surprised, as per moi, by this attached NooYark Sundae Tames piece by NYT Public Editor Clare Hoit on Miss Spelling of Names.

The frequnecy of that sin in that paper he reports is amazing, methought.

I'm still wondering whether the writer--or proof reader--might have misspelled any of the many names cited therein, provoking correction in the Times on Monday.

A bit near the end of the piece reminds this reader that when teaching eons ago at Carleton University J-school in Ottawa, a misspelled name in a student's story required an automatic failure mark. It could be awkward conveying such info to a faulting student whose name I couldn't spell. . . .

Another personal anecdote the Timespiece prompts: My first bylined piece at Reuters appeared prominently in the Washington Post--"By Carol Moolins."

(The tearsheet is somewhere in the basement.)

-cm 12-8-07

New York Times August 12, 2007

THE PUBLIC EDITOR

So Many Names, So Many Corrections

By Clark Hoyt

WHEN Michele Sugg, a clinical social worker from Branford, Conn., saw a friend’s name misspelled in The New York Times last month, she immediately asked for a correction.

Sugg’s friend was Stevie Ray Vaughan, the great blues guitarist. Years ago, Sugg worked at the Yale Psychiatric Institute with teenagers fighting drug and alcohol problems, and she said Vaughan was an inspiration to her patients. He had been a hard-core user who got sober, and he wrote encouraging notes to the kids.

But he has been dead for 17 years, so why get bothered now if The Times calls him Vaughn instead of Vaughan?

“One’s name is a part of one,” Sugg said. “It’s who you are. Even in death you want to be represented correctly.”

The fact is, The New York Times misspells names at a ferocious rate — famous names, obscure names, names of the dead in their obituaries, names of the living in their wedding announcements, household names from Hollywood, names of Cabinet officers, sports figures, the shoe bomber, the film critic for The Daily News in New York and, astonishingly and repeatedly, Sulzberger, the name of the family that owns The New York Times.

The Times has given Gen. Douglas MacArthur the middle initial A at least 25 times since 1987, though he had no middle name and didn’t use A, B, C or S, all of which have been ascribed to him.

So, you ask, what’s the big deal? Doesn’t The Times have more important things to worry about, like getting it right on Iraq and Iran and the presidential campaign?

Yes, a great newspaper has to get the big things right, but it also has to pay fanatical attention to thousands of details every day to prevent the kinds of mistakes that start readers wondering, “If they can’t spell his name right, what else is wrong with the story?”

Or, as Joe Lelyveld said in 2000, when he was executive editor of The Times, “When it comes to accuracy issues, tolerance and the larger view can be dangerous to our health.”

At a retreat of senior editors of The Times, Lelyveld called on them to “sweat the small stuff.” He bemoaned “the malignancy of misspelled names,” pointing out, among other things, that The Times had misspelled the first name of Madeleine Albright, who was then secretary of state, 49 times, despite running three corrections.

Unfortunately, the cancer appears to be getting worse. When Lelyveld spoke in
mid-September, there had been 198 corrections for misspelled names in The Times so far that year. Through yesterday, still in early August, there had been 269 this year. And the mistakes keep coming.

Monday’s corrections column on Page 2 contained three items that reflect helpless exasperation on the part of editors responsible for maintaining The Times’s high standards.

One noted that The Times had misspelled the name of Neiman Marcus, the department store, in at least 195 articles since 1930, most recently on July 21, in an obituary.

Another said that the name Willkie in the law firm of Willkie, Farr & Gallagher has been misspelled in at least 50 articles since 1958. It had happened again the previous Friday, in Business Day. The writer had dropped one of the two l’s in Willkie, who was Wendell L. Willkie, Franklin Roosevelt’s challenger in 1940.

But the killer was a correction for an article that ran the previous week, misspelling Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s last name for the 14th time since 2001, when he became White House counsel, including four earlier instances this year alone.

How could this one have happened, given that an editor in the Washington bureau, which has been responsible for 13 of the 14 mistakes, had recently sent colleagues a note of caution titled, “Do you know how to spell Gonzales?”

The latest misspelling appeared on Aug. 1. James Risen, a veteran national security affairs writer, said he was pushing deadline, typing fast and just got it wrong, typing Gonzalez, not Gonzales. “I should have gotten it right,” he said. “It was my fault, not the desk’s.”

The mistake was caught and corrected before the article was sent to New York. But the misspelling also appeared in two paragraphs that had been deleted for space reasons, so nobody fixed that part of the electronic copy.

Late in the evening, shortly before 11, editors decided that those two paragraphs needed to appear in the article because of competitive pressure: The Washington Post was putting the same information on Page 1. Susan Keller, the Washington bureau’s night editor, opened up the story, restored the paragraphs, then had to find other cuts to make room. The clock was ticking. An 11:30 deadline was approaching, other editors still had to read the article, and in her haste, Keller didn’t notice Gonzales’s name misspelled three times in the paragraphs she had put back.

In New York, time stamps indicate the story was opened at 11:10 p.m. and 11:12 p.m., and sent to type right on deadline at 11:30. Nobody noticed the errors. The spell-check in The Times’s electronic editing system does not flag either Gonzales or Gonzalez.

Keller was mortified by the error. She was the editor who had sent colleagues the note about Gonzales. “I guess it didn’t work,” she said.

I asked Greg Brock, the senior editor in charge of corrections, why he thinks so many names are misspelled in the paper, especially when The Times has so many layers of editing. In theory, every article is read by at least five people after a reporter finishes it, though stories written or changed for later editions often get far fewer checks.

Brock said that when he looks into mistakes he gets several common responses:

Reporters say they were operating from memory and didn’t bother to check. That’s what one writer said after misspelling the name of Julianna Margulies, the television actress.

Reporters assume that a name is spelled the “normal” way and don’t check. That’s what happened with the obituary of Neal Shine, the former publisher of The Detroit Free Press, whose first name was not Neil, as it appeared in the paper. Shine hired me in 1968, when he was the city editor of The Free Press, and he would get infuriated by errors like this.

Reporters checking names on the Internet are carelessly misled by other people’s misspellings.

Craig Whitney, the assistant managing editor in charge of standards, has another theory. “Their minds are on higher things,” he said. “They’re looking at the bigger story, and they think they can’t bother with details like that.” Besides, he added, they expect misspellings “will be caught on the copy desk.”

Is there anything that can be done to cure the problem? The Times has started keeping an electronic record of misspelled names, including the name of the staffer — spelled correctly — responsible for each error. I’d take another step to try to prevent more of the mistakes by creating a database of the most commonly misspelled names, so that editors are automatically flagged when they appear in copy. It’s Steven Spielberg, not Stephen.

Finally, my wife, a deputy managing editor at USA Today, had a journalism professor at Arizona State University who gave an automatic F to any class assignment that included a misspelled name.

The Times can’t do that, but maybe another kind of writing assignment is in order. How about requiring a personal letter of apology from the person responsible for an error to the person whose name is misspelled?

The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

90-year scoop


In my latest session transcribing the First World War diary of my father, Gunner Harry Whitfield Mollins, the account of his Canadian artillery battery’s advance to a “new position” in the late summer of 1916 aroused curiosity about a couple of points.

The new position was near the town of Albert in northwestern France. Several days after the move, he gets a chance to visit the town and reports on the damage warfare had inflicted on a local church and its spectacular steeple statue.

Not familiar with the town, let alone its church and steeple statue, I looked it up in an atlas and then on the Internet. What I found then, as you’ll see below the following diary excerpts, was that Dad’s entry on Sept. 1, 1916, had scooped Wikipedia and Taste-of-France websites--as well as piquing my interest as it had his more than 90 years ago.
- cm 1-8-07

Friday, August 25, 1916 Weather: Showers
Was at the new position again today. The work is proceeding fairly well. We are supposed to be making winter quarters. It is exceptionally quiet after the bombardment of yesterday afternoon and evening. Large gains are reported as a result of yesterday’s offensive. Witnessed several air fights today but saw no planes come down. Returned to camp about seven-thirty P.M. Was very tired & feeling quite “rotten” generally. Bed was a welcome relief. Oh! What would I not give to be home!

Thursday, August 31, 1916 Weather: Rain
. . . reported large gains by the Russians. They captured 15,500 men and about 300 officers. Most of them Austrians but among them were about 1,500 Germans. Italy has declared war on Germany and Rumania has entered the war on the side of the Allies by declaring war against Austria. This means something. Four shells fell in our new position but fortunately no one was hit.

Friday, September 1, 1916 Weather: Fine
Went to Albert today on the water lorrie for some water. This was my first trip to Albert & was very much interested in what I saw. Saw the beautiful large church now almost ruined by shell fire. On the steeple is a large gilded statue of the Virgin holding in her outstretched hands the child Jesus. It’s now tipped over at more than right angles to the steeple. The French say its fall will mark the end of the war.
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Albert, Somme, France 90 years later
From: http://www.a-taste-of-france.com/albert.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert,_Somme

Photo above from Wikipedia: Mural depicts 1916 destruction in Albert. Restored church visible.

Albert is a commune of the Somme département, in Picardie, northeastern France. Population: approx. 10,500 inhabitants. It is located a few km from the Belgian border, about halfway between Amiens and Bapaume .

Albert was founded in about 54 BC as a Roman outpost called Encre. It is remembered today as the site of the Battle of the Somme in World War I.

On January 15, 1915, in that combat, a shell struck Albert’s Basilica of Notre Dame de Brebieres, knocking a steeple statue of Mary and the infant Jesus - designed by sculptor Albert Roze and dubbed "Golden Virgin" - into a horizontal position, nearly falling. The Germans said that whoever made the statue fall would lose the war, and a number of legends surrounding the "Leaning Virgin" developed among German, French, British and Canadian soldiers. The Leaning Virgin became an especially familiar image to the thousands of British soldiers who fought at the Battle of the Somme (1916), many of whom passed through Albert, which was situated three miles from the front lines.

The German army recaptured the town in March, 1918, during the Spring Offensive; the British, to prevent the Germans from using the church tower as an observation post, directed their bombardment against the basilica. The statue fell in April 1918 and was never recovered. In August 1918 the Germans were again forced to retreat, and the British reoccupied Albert until the end of the war.

Albert was completely reconstructed after the war, including widening and re-orienting the town's main streets. The Basilica, however, was faithfully rebuilt according to its original design by Eduoard Duthoit, the son of the architect who had overseen its construction in 1885-95. The present statue is an exact replica of Roze's original design, and a war memorial designed by Roze and featuring an image of the "Leaning Virgin" can be seen in the "Abri" (Shelter) Museum, which houses souvenirs of the war.

The underground shelters in which the museum is located served as protective bunkers for Albert's residents during aerial bombardments in World War II. #

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Exciting Times in T.O.


With the Ontario provincial election only weeks away (Oct. 10), and Toronto city budgeters quarreling over a looming bankruptcy, it's exciting to see the politicians hereabouts beginning to campaign in earnest over matters involving our uncertain future.

Just a couple of days ago, John Tory, the appropriately surnamed fresh leader of the Ontario legislature's opposition Progressive Conservative Party launched an electioneering challenge.

He stepped up to news media microphones and cameras to serve notice that his party is determined to take over from the stumbling Dalton McGuinty Liberal government in order to protect dogs and cats.

His first electorial promise: A Tory government will enact a law to punish Ontarians who abuse their pets with up to two years in jail, fines up to $60,000 and a lifetime ban on animal ownership.

Almost simultaneously, as if in tune with the provincial Tories, Toronto City Hall's socialist-led council stepped up to do something positive about the local dog's life.

Shortly after a council vote effectively postponed action to plug a $350-million budget shortfall, councillors together approved the provision of more off-leash areas for dogs in Toronto parks. They agreed to spend $1 million a year on "special constables" to supervise the dog runs.

Among the dog-cop's duties will be making sure female dogs in heat aren't allowed to roam free.

But questions have been raised. Such as those of citizen Jean-anne Moors, who wonders in a July 24 letter to The Globe and Mail: "How are they [special constables] going to do that? Observe all female dogs privates? . . . Isn't it doggie sexism to target females while male dogs can cavort, testicles intact?"

Truly thrilling political times, eh? - cm 24-7-07

Monday, June 11, 2007

Allergia


Before going to bed on Sunday--soon after an in-depth, intimate discussion of allergies with friends at the Groundhog pub--I opened windows front and back to create a cooling, fresh-air breeze.

My head had hardly hit the pillow before I began sneezing and snorting as my eyes dripped wetly. I leapt from bed, Kleenex-equipped, and slammed shut the windows to guard against any further personal damage wrought from what--I had been reminded only hours earlier--was a wild and dirty outdoor sex orgy.

I should have known better than to expose my sensitive senses with windows ajar to the loose living among the rapaciously sex-mad vegetation outside.

I had just been remindingly warned by friend Peter Calamai in a racy Toronto Sunday Star article in its Ideas section (pasted below), headlined "Pollen and the hidden sexuality of flowers."

Hardly hidden, I'd say. The article gets, at times quite rudely, into the immoral behaviour going on too close to home for my liking.

To wit, Peter writes: "The hot and heavy action begins when a pollen grain lands on the surface of a flower's stigma, the outermost lip of the pistil or female sex organ."

Well, I tell you, plants and trees, as I now yell at you every night before closing the windows˜"MY SCHNOZZ AIN'T NO STIGMA!"

Speaking of stigmas, our house is surrounded by them--six trees out back, three out front, not to mention the flowers and grasses. As well, there are the inevitable Lilacs and Forsythias, which are becoming for me as morally offensive as the Dubya Bush.

But how is it possible for me to counter-attack in a time when greenery, for all its shameful and personally injurious behaviour, is championed as a foe of global warming by almost everybody but Dubya and his pal Steve Harper?
cm Monday, 11-6-07

P.S. For quite sexy colour pix of six of the horniest pollens, look up Sunday Star's pg ID3.
http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/223612

The kicker of the Calamai report notes: "As these photographs testify, pollen is very much a union of art and science. It certainly isn't anything to sneeze at."
Yeah, right--Haaaschooo--Peter. / cm


Pollen and the hidden sexuality of flowers
Of stigma, pistils and swollen tubes, and how pollen is optimized for `the sex act'

Toronto Sunday Star June 10, 2007 Peter Calamai Science Reporter

So small, so vital, so beautiful. And so very sexy.

That pretty much sums up pollen, whose grains can be mistaken for specks of dust, but which is essential to the survival of most of the world's 250,000 species of flowering plants, including vegetables like tomatoes and even palms.

Under the close-up lens and microscope, however, pollen grains are revealed as nature's temples, breathtakingly complex in design, seemingly infinite in variety and bursting with sexuality.

Deep down we probably all realized that pollen is somehow involved in the sexual reproduction of flowering plants.

Artist Rob Kesseler and botanical researcher Madeline Harley explain the overriding optimization of pollen for what they call "the sex act" in a stunning volume Pollen: The Hidden Sexuality of Flowers (Firefly Books, $60).

The 200-plus photographs, most in colour and enlarged hundreds or thousands of times, bring out the inherent sensuality of pollen, just as the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe and the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe did for flowers.

The end result of Kesseler's artistic interpretation and Harley's botanical explanation bears out the 17th century judgment of Nehemiah Grew, one of the first to study grains of pollen through a microscope, who called them "particles of prolifick virtue."

Microscopes are crucial to the scientific saga of pollen because the largest grains – those of the common Forget-Me-Not – are a mere half-millimetre across. Most are only one-tenth that size. Yet into that minute space is packed an astonishingly complex structure optimized for one purpose: to deliver male sperm cells to the female ovaries of flowers.

Pollen comes in tens of thousands of shapes and colours, some so specific that trained botanists can pinpoint the origin of grains down to an individual species of flowering plant. Other designs are shared by entire plant families.

This pollen "fingerprint" is what lets researchers reconstruct the climate of eons past from pollen preserved in ice cores or the sediments of lake bottoms.

It is also how forensic investigators can narrow down the season when a victim died, from the pollen deposited on the body.

Yet despite this design profusion, all pollen boasts an airtight outer wall impervious to the vicissitudes of nature encountered as the grains make the perilous reproductive quest borne on the wind or carried by bees and other insects.

This "exine" is made of a carbon-based substance that scientists still have not completely deciphered but which has kept some pollen safe in a mummified state for millions of years.

Pollen can be either dry or sticky, as anyone knows who has ever found their clothes or hands stained yellow by the oily liquid from the pollen of day lilies.

This "pollenkitt" attracts insects, lets the grains stick to such travellers, and even acts as a natural sunscreen to protect the delicate sperm cells against UV radiation.

Each exine has at least one shielded opening, which can be a simple slit in the most primitive plants or a geometric array of multiple openings more intricate than any crystal stuck onto the side of a museum. The openings are critical in the sex act of pollination.

The hot and heavy action begins when a pollen grain lands on the surface of a flower's stigma, the outermost lip of the pistil or female sex organ.

Recognition chemicals signal whether the pollen is compatible with that particular plant. If so, the pollen grain rapidly absorbs moisture from the stigma surface.

The moisture swells the inner layer of the pollen's hard wall, which the authors compare to the marzipan underneath a cake's icing. This cracks the shield behind an outer opening and shoots out as a swollen pollen tube, with two sperm cells near the tip.

The cells of pollen tubes are the fastest growing of all plant cells. They have to be, because the tubes rapidly grow longer and thinner as they race toward the flower's ovaries to be first to deliver their sperm.

As these photographs testify, pollen is very much a union of art and science. It certainly isn't anything to sneeze at.#

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