Category: Practice

The Diceman cometh, and goeth

‘What’s on my mind,’ Facebook asks?  Now and again on my patrol of Newtown streets between the Ack-comedy and home, I see a die or even a pair of coloured dice stuck to the top of  a street electricity circuit capsule. The Diceman cometh and goeth. 

In the very building where the Ack-comedy nestles Diceman has left a mark. There is a single yellow die glued to the top of the switch box in the hallway along from the door. The lighting being what it is in the hallway, some people might not even notice it. Downstairs in the front door lobby of the building there is large glassed-in noticeboard in a metal frame, and for some time there was a green die glued to the top of this structure, but lately it has disappeared.  

I did once mention these oddities to a neighbour in the building who dismissed the subject as human idiocy.  A conclusion that is hard to argue, but still….well, not specific enough to be the last word.

Then the other day [… drum roll] while getting a take-away coffee from the local human charging station, I noticed the nearby electricity capsule, which has not had a dome on it for years, festooned with a number of dice.  

Diceman returneth, I thought, and wondered what was next.  Little did I know, again.  

Then today, back at the charging station I noticed that the dice had been removed, that is, broken off the top of the capsule, leaving behind small coloured hints of glue.  Ouch!  But the dome has not been replaced.  

How will Diceman react to that? Is it a challenge from Anti-Diceman? Are these two super duper antagonists from another space-time dimension who have carried their dicey conflict into ours? How will the next roll fall? Will crap or craps be the result?  

Stay tuned for updates on this Newtown mystery.  

Book Collector has paid for itself many times over by preventing the purchase of multiple copies of the same book.   An appealing book or one I thought I should read and so have on the shelf to encourage me to read it was purchased and stacked away for future reading or reference and… a  few years later the same book comes to hand and I have the same thought and buy another copy, and then later another.  Nothing but that memory lapse could explain why I had three copies of something like Antonio Gramsci’s unreadable The Modern Prince. (Yes, I know, ‘Why have one copy at all?’ No answer to that.) 

I became painfully aware of these multiple copies when upon retirement I was preparing to move my professional library of about 5000 titles.  As I was thinning the collection, shredding textbooks and other items I saw of no further use, I told Trevor Cook about this labour and he told me about Book Collector.  

Wow!  I did not know such applications existed and made it a mission to find out more.  That was about ten years ago.  The timing was opportune as I was moving and re-shelving and so each book had to be handled a couple of times.  Hence I acquired the app and got to work.

I found my first use easy and simple.  Of course, I had a long backlog amounting to about 2500 titles after I finished shredding books.  I purchased a scanner and used that to ease the burden, and it worked fine on books with a bar code.  Recommended.

However, my collection dates back to graduate school in the 1960s and many of the books that I retained had neither as ISBN nor a bar code, while others had an ISBN on the obverse of the title page but no bar code and so had to be keyed in.  I paced this work to about 50-60 a day (about 400 a week) so that I could do other things and not go crazy and make too many mistakes. In a month most of the work was done, and I am very pleased.

Cataloguing identified what I had and synchronizing the catalogue to my cell phone has saved me several duplicate purchases very quickly, and more since.  Three or four such saves more than paid for the software, the scanner, and the time and trouble to learn its use.  

Now there is a hitch here. When I brag to visitors that I have catalogued all the books in my library they assume that means a given order on the shelves, and it does not.  I have grouped the books by subject matter but not anchored any of them to a sequence, shelf mark, or locale.  Maybe I should have but I did not and now it seems a task beyond my needs, abilities, and interests.  The books on a subject like ‘Utopia’ occupy a bay with the tallest on the bottom shelf.  All the reference books are in another bay.  The titles on the history of political thought occupy the top shelves in the bookcases I face from my desk as my favourites.  While there is room in the template to enter such shelving information, it has to be done manually and I have not done that.  

Adding books by title and author or ISBN works pretty well but it is not perfect. I find books published in Australia are less likely to be retrieved, and recently issued books with ISBNs still sometimes prove illusive, so there is still more manual entry than I would like.  

When I am doing this manual entry at times the application has asked me to enter the data a second time on the master data base (the core) in the Cloud and I found that an annoyance. Since I have already entered the data on my system, could it not be uploaded from there rather than keyed in again?   But that practice seems now to have stopped.  

When I capture a book by the automated search I find sometimes that the author’s first and last names get transposed and have to keep an eye on that.  This becomes even more pesky with several authors.  Then there is the need to distinguish translators and editors from authors, say of an edition of Plato’s Republic of which I have six or eight. For scholars these distinctions are crucial.  

The templates have pages and boxes for everything imaginable and some things unimaginable to me, but in my case most are empty.  Those that come with drop down lists are easy to complete, and I have done that, creating a few categories of my own.    

In the last five years I have become converted to digital reading on a Kindle for the convenience, accessibility, text searching, and more.  Not having a copy of the book to put in the pending tray on my desk means that sometimes I forget to enter them in the catalogue, and I have not yet developed a method to overcome such slips of memory.  

I have been confused a few times when changing to a new computer about the catalogue files and I am sure I lost data at least once.  The files names and locations are a mystery to me.  

Like everyone else I wish, sometimes, that applications were integrated.  I use EndNote a lot (and it is a beast and have never been invited to give feedback on it) and means I key in duplicate information on Book Collector and EndNote quite often.  That is no doubt good for the soul but it is tedious.  

While listing nits, I should say I also find it impossible to distinguish among the many products associated with Book Collector.  CLZ Barry left me blank. Such proliferation I suppose meets some need, but not mine.  

Having BC has meant I catalogued my library, something I would not have done without it, and that has been invaluable.  I have heard fellow book worms say they know where every one of their 5000 books is shelved without the need for such a computer crutch but I don’t believe them.     

In response to popular demand here are a few words about how the daily dose of five factlets history has been selected and presented over the last twelve months.

To survey one day in history, write the report, find images, and post the completed work takes about an hour.

Why five items and not ten or one? Five seems enough to offer a range of events spread over time. On some slow history days it is a stretch to get to five. Only once did I included six (on April 24), rather than five, because I could not decide which to cut. I did another time by mistake.

Priorities

To start with the obvious. Only events that have been dated and recorded can be included. Moreover, the event(s) have to be registered on one of the web sites that are harvested. (See below.) We do not know when Columbus first thought about going West to find the East, but we do know the day he sailed, or when a Zulu chief united his people.

The International Date Line was ignored. Too complicated.

A daily dose should have a range of times into the past. Per Edmund Burke, the future is also part of this time travelling exercise, e.g., the birthdate of James T. Kirk, first contact with the Vulcans, or the next visit of Halley’s Comet all qualify.

A daily dose should offer a geographic spread around the world. Events in the United States dominate the web sites but I tried to garnish that with a mix from elsewhere, the more exotic the better. Hence Timbuktu and Ulan Baator have appeared in the dose.

From one day to the next the daily dose should be varied, not dominated by same kinds of events from the same places. This standard is hard to achieve because recorded events are, well, recorded, like patents and there are a lot of them.

Where pertinent emphasis goes to the Enlightenment agenda of science, reason, music, literature, and humanity. Scientific discoveries, the publication of books, and acts to comprehend human wholeness frequently make the list.

Of course not everything is done in a single event but grow from chains of events, trials and errors, and accident. The development of the telephone, for one example, had many (mis)steps and several of these have made this list. Blind allies are part of the story.

There are two idiosyncrasies. First, the odd and obscure are sometimes included for amusement, though they leave little behind. An example is tightrope walking over Niagara Falls. Second, items with which we have a personal connection will be included and these associations will be mentioned in the text.

Sounds easy, but it is not as easy as all that. Each year there is a spring concert season in Vienna, and in a few April weeks much enduring music has premiered. Sporting achievements are clustered at the certain times, e.g., the Summer and Winter Olympics. Nobel Prizes announcements are also concentrated.

Labelling.

To give the reader an overview I occasionally tagged each item with a place and a genre, for example, D.C., Politics. I do not have a set list of genres but apply one as seems best on the occasion. I started doing this for an editorial check on the scope and range on a day.

Exclusions.

No wars, no battles, no slaughters, no pogroms, no lynchings, no boys blowing each other up, are not listed though there are far too many of them because, well, these things need no further circulation or thought. The first shots fired on Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861 were not included, despite the fact that we have been on Fort Sumter. The Japanese bombardment of Pearl Harbor was likewise passed in silence, though we have been to Pearl more than once. The principle is to give these events no further currency and publicity. The emphasis here falls elsewhere with very few exceptions.

Neither are births and deaths included. We all have to be born and that hardly seems a distinction. That which an individual creates, discovers, makes, conceives, writes, does, and leaves to the world comes later. Similarly, death is not always the end of the influence individuals, some of whom grow more significant when viewed in retrospect.

Exceptions are made when it suits me, like Niccolò Machiavelli’s birth and the start of Operation Dynamo or instances of George Custer’s stupendous incompetence.

Qualifications

Dates are required, and not everything is dated as noted above. We do not know the day when Chinese astrologer-astronomers first trained their eyes on Mars, yet surely they did. The date when Pharaoh commissioned the Sphinx is unknown, but we do know when it was found. There are few dates associated with the empires and civilisations of black Africa. Written records favour events like patents and publications.

But even with publications there are lacuna. On what day of the week, month of the year, and year was Plato’s Republic published? Of course, it was not published as we use the word today, and he did not present it whole but worked it out piece by piece. But we can know the exact date upon which the earliest Latin rendering of the Republic was sold at auction (and for how much).

Most of the recorded events come from the Northern Hemisphere and follow the seasons there with more items in the Spring and Summer than in mid-Winter (apart from Canadian hockey). There are far fewer items from sub-Saharan Africa and insular South East Asia. I was surprised at how few items I came across from Spanish America, considering how long it has existed, its vast extent, and it large population. No doubt that reflects the sources I used. The compensation for continental paucity is that when items from these under-represented regions appeared, they were very likely to be included because they are exotic.

The Report

Once five items are in hand, the next step is to double check with Wikipedia or Google about details. Some of the History today websites seem to have been prepared by web crawlers, misspellings and missing text occur, along with direct contradictions. Others are unfathomable, cryptic. Think of the tweets of President Twit and that is the illustration. Garbled. I have included a sampling of some of the mystifying ones below.

There follows a Google search for an image to illustrate each item, to give readers some eye candy as relief from text. The pedant in me finds that maps that show the distance and route are very useful. Instances of technology, say an early telephone, show us how far developments have come since that beginning. In all cases Wikipedia is the final authority.

Nearly all the sources I consulted use the present tense which flattens history and so I have edited the summaries to use past tenses. Homer nodded and sometimes I forgot to do this.

Sources

The following web sites are consulted in the order listed. Over the year the list grew.

Library of Congress
Australia Today
National Library of Canada Today
New Zealand History
People’s History
History Net
History Channel
Today’s Historical Events
Nebraska History
On This Day in History
Scope System History Today
Daily Dose of History
Wikipedia

Why did I do it?

It started on a whim when I realised these history-on-this-day websites existed. I had a look and made a short list for our own amusement. Reviewing the historical list for the next day soon became an evening ritual at Alpha Prime. When I mentioned this ritual to someone, that person suggested blogging it, and I started. By posting a link on Facebook to the blog, it is made known, and it seems to attract hits on the blog, about sixty every twenty-four years. (Yes, I have sampled the count.) Because other items are on the blog the thought is to give them exposure, too, through a Facebook link.

Like all good things, it will came to an end when the year was completed.

Examples of incomprehensible or trivial examples.

Of course house fires, the comings and goings of celebrities, and car crashes are world news to the ABC AmBulance Chasers, but here are a few examples that I found without merit. They are the full text as I found it.

1156 Henry II Jasormigott leaves Bavaria

1779 Earl d’Orleans sails back to Brest

1913 1st US milch goat show held, Rochester, NY

1942 German occupiers take silver anniversary coins in battle

1957 1st edition newspaper the Ware Time (in Suriname), 1,700 die

1960 Dutch 1st chamber commends soccer-law

1963 WCTI TV channel 12 in New Bern, NC begins broadcasting

1982 Rolling Stone Keith Richard house burns down

1984 Morocco Showcase opens

1985 7 die in car crash in San Jose, California

1990 Steve Allen, installed as a new abbot

1993 Eastern Tennessee begins using new area code 423

1996 “7 Guitars” closes at Walter Kerr Theater NYC

2013 Minibus collides with a train in Lasi, Romania

1865 William and Catherine Booth started an organisation that developed into the Salvation Army in 1878. It exists today in 128 countries working in 175 languages. In addition to the uniforms, it has a system of ranks, a flag, the red shield, a tartan, the Red Kettle, the bell, and publications.

1900 Jean Sibelius’s ‘Finlandia’ debuted in Helsinki while Finland was a Grand Duchy ruled by the Russian Tsar. Because of its celebration of Finnish history, to avoid Russian censorship and reaction it was thereafter often performed under other titles like Happy Feelings on a Spring Day or a Choral March. In 1940 it was made the Finnish national anthem and libretto supplied during the Winter War with Russia. Seen the Sibelius monument in Helsinki.

1922 Oslo, Politics. Fridtjof Nansen convened the Intergovernmental Conference on Identify Certificates for the League of Nations, creating the Nansen passport for stateless refugees until 1938. Among those who had one were Robert Capa, Marc Chagall, Vladimir Nabokov, Aristotle Onassis, Anna Pavlova, and Igor Stravinsky. Today the UN and some countries issue certificates of identity to stateless persons.

1962 Bentonville, AK, Commerce. Sam Walton opened the first Walmart store. There are more than 11,000 stores in 27 countries with 2.2 million employees turing over $US 500 billion a year. It all started in the store pictured below. Been in many of them, most recently in Waikiki.

1964 After quoting the Martin Luther King, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which the previous Kennedy Administration had been unable to get through Congress. Comments on Robert Caro’s magisterial biography of LBJ are scattered through this blog in which the story of LBJ driving members of the House and Senate to vote for it is told with Shakespearean intensity.

1847 The first US Postage stamp was issued portraying Benjamin Franklin who started the American postal service in 1790.

1867 The British North American Act united the colonies of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick into the Canadian Confederation. From this seed Canada drew. Originally, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island were hold-outs but later joined as did the western provinces in time.

1972 The first issue of Ms magazine founded by Gloria Steinem appeared with Wonder Woman on the cover. Still going. Known a few contributors.

1979 The Sony Walkman went on sale. Cheap, reliable, portable it was a commercial success despite the poor sound quality. It brought together existing technologies in a novel way. The original prototypes were for the personal use of the corporation president who frequently traveled and liked classical music. Later when he tried to market the Walkman he was nearly displaced by members of the board who thought it would be a costly loser. Wrong!

1997 Hong Kong transferred to PRC. Been there a couple of times but not lately. Got a frisson each time when I saw the PRC flag at the airport and the armed guards who looked like teenage conscripts who spoke no English with automatic rifles.

1857 St Martin’s, Literature: Charles Dickens read ‘A Christmas Carol’ in his first public reading.

1906 DC, Politics: Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act partly in response to Upton Sinclair’s exposés of the grotesque practices in the food business in the novel ‘The Jungle’ and in his journalism.

1908 Tunguska (Russia), Science: A giant fireball caused by the explosion of a large meteoroid flattened an estimated 80 million trees over 2000 square kilometres in Yeniseysk, the largest extraterrestrial impact ever. It struck an area with virtually no human inhabitants. Certainly none remained alive afterward to answer inane questions from journalists. Hillary did it, according to Pox News.

1997 London, Literature: J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel, ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ was released. It has since sold 120 million copies and counting.

2016 Älmhult (Sweden), Commerce: The Ikea Museum opened on the site of the very first of its stores. The last piece remains missing. Entrants must traverse all aisles to leave. There are no short cuts. Abandon hope all ye who shop there.

1827 Genoa, Italy. James Smithson died, leaving his fortune ‘to the United States of America, to found at Washington, an establishment for the increase and diffusion knowledge.’ He had never visited the US nor did he know any Americans, but he had read about this new country, while in the old country he had seen private natural history and manuscript collections discarded, broken up, or destroyed by those who did not appreciate them. A biography of Smithson is discussed in another post on this blog for those seeking Enlightenment. Deaths are not usually noted on this blog but Smithson warrants an exception.

1833 Canterbury, Connecticut. White woman Prudence Crandall was arrested and fined for teaching black women to read. A Quaker, Crandall was driven out of town in the backlash fomented by the Pox News of the day. She moved to Kansas.

1922 Chicago, Literature. The American Library Assocaition awarded the first Newbery Medal for children’s literature. Frederic Melcher, one-time book store owner, had long agitated for an award for children’s books to encourage originality and excellence in authors and to direct readers to valuable books. Others joined Mercher and it was named for John Newbery, an 18th Century English bookman, considered the first self-conscious children’s author. Newbery prize winners figured considerably in my earliest reading.

1924 New York City, Politics. The name of suffragette Lena Jones Wade Springs of Tennessee was placed in nomination for the Vice-Presidential place on the Democratic Party presidential slate. This was the first time a woman’s name had been mentioned in an American presidential nominating convention. Oscar Underwood of Alabama made this gesture. Springs received a few votes from the floor and the nomination later went to Charles Bryan of Nebraska, brother to the Great Commoner. This is the famous hung convention that went to 103 ballots for the presidential nomination John Davis was the eventual nominee. A biography of Underwood is discussed elsewhere on this blog.

1967 Enfield, England. Barclay’s Bank installed an ATM. Comedy actor Reg Varney inaugurated it, the first of its kind. The device accepted paper cheques with a magnetic strip authorised by a six-digit PIN. The engineers who developed it were inspired by vending machines dispensing chocolate bars. I used one like this in Boston in 1979 which had a tendency to mangle the checks.

1483 After parliament declared Edward V illegitimate, the Duke of Gloucester became King Richard III. Out came the knives. (Years ago I took my heavily annotated copy Shakespeare eponymous play to a book binder for repair, and….never got it back, despite my several efforts. Gulp! I still miss it.)

1498 The first documented use of a toothbrush occurred in China. It was made from boar bristles. Psst, such bristles remained in use on toothbrushes until well into the Twentieth Century suitably bleached, standardised, and disguised so that the boar would never recognise itself in the bristles.

1870 Munich, Music. The premier of Richard Wagner’s ‘Valkyrie,’ the second part of the ring Cycle including the Ride of the Valkyries. It was tempting to use a still from that scene in ‘Apocalypse Now’ but forbore.

1945 San Francisco, Politics. Australia become one of first twenty-six nations to join the United Nations. Foreign Minister in the Labor government, Dr H. V. Evatt, signed the treaty.

1963 Before the Berlin Wall ‘Ich bin ein Berliner,’ said President Kennedy to an audience of four hundred and fifty thousand who cheered his words in dark days. Only later did the attack of the pigmies. Fake news has been around a long time. The picture below is from a memorial service held in Berlin 2016 for murder victims of a terrorist attack. By the way the Wikipedia entry makes short shrift of the pigmies.

1678 Padua, Education. Venetian noblewoman Elena Cornaro Piscopia was awarded a doctorate of philosophy, making her the first woman to earn a PhD. She had been a child prodigy in music and languages and the University of Padua near Venice, after several petitions and some financial considerations, allowed her to study theology so that she might better translator gospel texts.

1847 The city of Melbourne was proclaimed. Governor Bourke in Sydney had discouraged settlement around Port Phillip but John Batman disregarded this edict and persisted and prevailed when in a masterstroke he proposed naming the new settlement after the current British prime minister. No longer could Bourke object. This is the origin of the continuing feud between Sydney and Melbourne, much discussed in the latter and unknown in the former.

1857 Paris, Literature. Gustav Flaubert went on trial for public immortality for his novel Madame Bovary. Today there is more public immortality on show on television at any time. Flaubert was acquitted and used the experience in another of his novels.

1868 The US Congress legislated an eight-hour day for all federal employees, albeit in a six-day work week.

1978 The first use of the rainbow flag in a march in San Francisco. It is much seen around Newtown but I wonder how many who sport it know the interpretation of the colours as below. I didn’t. The Wikipedia entry is so inclusive that it is incoherent.

1497 Sailing from Bristol with a commission from English King Henry VII, Venetian navigator Giovanni Caboto landed on the coast of Newfoundland and claimed it for his sponsor. To make it easier to cash pay cheques he called himself John Cabot. He landed at the spot shown below.

1648 Margaret Brent, an unmarried woman, demanded a voice and a vote in the Maryland Assembly, and was refused. She owned property in her own name thanks to the intervention of Governor Leonard Calvert who also made her executor of his will. The English Civil War spread to the colony with Protestant seaboard raids on the largely Catholic immigrants in which Calvert died. She used the proceeds from his will to pay the soldiers who defended the colony. None of this would convince the Assembly to hear her. She moved shortly thereafter to inland Virginia.

1947 Mount Rainer, WA. Pilot Kenneth Arnold while air spotting for the forest service coined the term ‘flying saucer’ when he reported seeing nine bright objects in a chain formation nearby. The free press exercised its usual responsibility.

1964 The U.S. Federal Trade Commission required cigarette packing to include warnings about the harmful effects of smoking. See if you can spot it below.

1968 Montréal. Politics. Newly incumbent Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was pelted by rocks and bottles from Separatists at the annual parade for the patron saint of Quebec, St Jean Baptiste. He refused to leave the exposed viewing platform despite the barrage, and eventually the police restored order. It was part of his life’s work to see-off Quebecois Separatists in favour of Canadian unity. He is shown in the circle below in the front row while others went to take cover. He, of course, was the target, not the others. René Lévesque, then the unofficial leader of the Separatist movement, denounced this assault as cowardly and despicable and walked the streets thereafter with Trudeau in a show of civility. This event is one of the first things I saw on CBC television.