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Australia Day and the black-armband view of history
Two Augusts ago I was in the stands at Brisbane's Exhibition Grounds waiting for the evening performance at the "Ekka" -- Queensland's state fair -- to begin. The crowd stood at attention as a cowgirl on horseback rode around the arena waving a huge Australian flag. The band played and...
Tony Hancock: The Blood Donor
Comedian Tony Hancock and writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson were pioneers of the situation comedy on British radio and TV in the 1950s and 1960s. At a time when comedy shows usually relied on short sketches with one gag after another, catchphrases and silly voices, Hancock's Half-Hour featured a...
Nora Batty's House and the Wrinkled Stocking Tea Room
Photo of Sid's Cafe, Holmfirth, Yorkshire, by Flickr user nechbi, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (CC BY 2.0) One of my favorite TV series is the long-running BBC sitcom "Last of the Summer Wine," about the exploits of three old men with plenty of time to get into...
Talyllyn Railway: "The Railway with a Heart of Gold"
Amongst the cache of educational short-subject films available at the Internet Archive, I came across this documentary of a narrow-gauge railway in northwestern Wales, the Talyllyn Railway, being kept alive by preservationists. The documentary was released in 1965, but was filmed in the early 1950s. The railway opened in 1866...
Taking the Englishness out of the English language
There's no place for "plaice" in this dictionary. Words about Christianity (vicar, sin, parish), Christmas (carol, mistletoe), the monarchy (coronation, duke, monarch), seafood (lobster, mussel), pets (corgi, goldfish, hamster), fairy tales (elf, goblin), woodland flora (tulip, sycamore, pasture), and fauna (doe, starling, terrapin) are gone, too, from a popular children's...
Lord Bates of Langbaurgh
I keep an eye, via Technorati, for blog references to Michael Bates, to find out who might be taking my name in vain. Most of the hits on the name are either for the Indian-born British actor, famed for his roles in A Clockwork Orange, Bedazzled, and as Field Marshal...
Michael Bates to retire
No, not me, darn it. Michael S. Bates, Human Resources Director for the City of Tulsa, is stepping down after nearly 12 years in the post and 34 years as a city employee. He's one of the reasons I have made a point of using my middle initial here, in...
Go, go, Pogo!
Dawn Eden earlier today posted this interesting entry, reflecting on an essay about Catholicism and the empowerment of women. I'll get back to that thought, perhaps, but what caught my eye was her clever headline, "Churchy La Femme", which was hot-linked somewhere. Merely a pun on the French epigram, cherchez...
Ending a segregated academic program at MIT
In the midst of all the talk about racial preferences in college admissions, it's not often mentioned that many colleges which receive federal funds have racially-exclusive programs, a clear violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Roger Clegg, in NRO, reports that his organization has notified 26 universities that their...
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