Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) SDA Late Nite Radio.
In The Adventure of English, Melvin Bragg’s fascinating and highly-readable book about the origins of our language, the author describes how an English speaker who hears someone speaking in Frisian, our nearest ancestral language, may get an odd, persistent feeling that he is this close to understanding what’s being said. Many of the words are almost identical (“goose” is goes, “butter” is buter, “sleep” is sliepe, “sea” is see, “cheese” is tsiis, and so on) but are simply pronounced a bit differently, and in that sense, he notes, Frisian is not so very different from England’s regional Geordie dialect, for example, and only slightly less comprehensible.
Stanley Unwin, tonight’s featured performer, was a British comedic actor with a peculiar and artful talent for speaking in a way that left listeners similarly hovering on the edge of comprehension. His unusual word constructions all sounded vaguely familiar, and he was so reassuringly English in his mannerisms and delivery that listeners who – inevitably, and by design, of course – could never quite parse the always convincing-sounding point he was making always felt that the shortfall must be their own fault, and that they would surely understand him if only they listened a bit more closely. Unwin traced the origins of his “strange but strangely comprehensible lexicon” to the day when his mother, who had tripped on the way home from work, told him that she’d “‘falolloped’ in front of a tram and grazed her ‘kneeclappers.'” His own use of language would later show that same sort of Joycean creativity: Elvis “wasp-waist and swivel-hippy” Presley, for example, was “tilty hibbers’n stick out the torso’n wobble both knee-clappers’n singit…”
Tonight’s selection, from the British film Carry On Regardless, is an excerpt of a scene in which Unwin’s baffling argot results in him being mistaken for a job applicant when he is in fact the business’ landlord trying to tell the owners that he has found another tenant. Watch the hilarious facial expressions of Miss Cooling at 2:37, as she hovers in a state of mild, diligence-induced torment: she doesn’t have the first clue as to what Unwin is saying, but his tone and cadence and and intonation are so eloquent-sounding as to leave her troubled by the possibility that he is speaking quite comprehensibly, and that she’s just not picking up on it – a self-doubt surely validated by Kenneth Williams’ character’s casual ability to precisely restate Unwin’s – apparently clear – position.
Here it is then, for your amusement: Stanley Unwin baffles the Carry On Team.
The thread is open for your Reader Tips.
Hey! Stop yer Googling! Yer flooding the Maldives:
“IT research firm Gartner estimates Google’s data centres contain nearly a million servers, each drawing about 1 kilowatt of electricity. So every hour Google’s engine burns through 1 million kilowatt-hours. Google serves up approximately 10 million search results per hour, so one search has the same energy cost as turning on a 100-watt light bulb for an hour.
“This doesn’t bode well. Even though the average American performs just 1.5 searches per day, it is hard to imagine that this will not rise dramatically.
“The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that data centres are responsible for 1.5 per cent of US energy use. How much more will that be when we, and our gadgets, are doing hundreds of searches per day? Or when the planet’s 6 billion inhabitants all want equal access? We’ve all heard the future of information architecture is cloud computing. It just might be a cloud of carbon dioxide.”
Thanks for that show, EBD. I’ve watched it a few times, and I’ve found that each time I watch it Mr. Unwin seems to become more understandable (as one might expect would be the case when, continuing your example, an English speaker listens to Frisian). I think that’s both because one becomes more accustomed to the ways Unwin’s language does express, and because one becomes less distracted by the ways it doesn’t, and yet also because once one’s brain has heard the normal interpretation, it then tends to predict that such will be the case, and then only seeks confirmation or invalidation thereto.
It seems to me to be the case (and there is evidence for this argument in experimental results, as we’ve discussed in the SDA LNR DLDI Symposia) that our brains are engines that perform an interesting dance between prediction, confirmation, realization, and feedback, which is pretty cool, I think. Not only that, I fully agree with you that The Adventure of English is an excellent book. I’d like to add to the pile Born to Kvetch, which will I think, like AoE, be fascinating to students of English in respect of the effects that other languages and cultures have had on her, and how she has responded thereto. Consider, for example, comparing and contrasting Mr. Unwin’s performance above, to that of Chazan Shepsil Kanarek’s Audition Sketch.
There’s nothing like English because only English has a little of everything in it.
Anti-Semitic magic marker graffiti in Carleton University bathroom being investigated by Hate Crimes Unit. Machete attacks not so much.
If only there were some way to make a Warren Kinsella joke about this.
via. FiveFeetofFury
Yep, Black Mamba, that’s just…is there a word for “a sad laugh”?
Imaginary nazi-losers with a marker pen are a grave threat to the nation, whereas a Machete attack on a student who is a supporter of Israel is, I don’t know, a quid pro quo for Israel’s brutality, I guess.
Ah well, Jews have no use for washrooms anyway – here’s Journalist Dr. Issam ‘Abd Al-Latif Al-Fulaijk, writing in Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Watan:
“The Jews will remain Jews even if you bathe and wash them in soap and water. They do not change…”
“We [should] learn from the experience of Adolf Eichmann, [who was] head of the Department for Jewish Affairs in the Gestapo and top commander of Auschwitz [sic], the biggest [concentration] camp for Jews. Eichmann tried to help the Jews during Hitler’s mass murders of them….”
(…)
“Eichmann stood before the cameras in a military posture and said: ‘…The fact that cuts me to the heart is that I helped to save you [Jews] from Hitler’s crematoria and dealt with you humanely, while you dogs showed me the greatest villainy…..You are no more than a gang of terrorists, murderers, and suckers of the blood of the nations. Nothing suits you better than to burn in Hitler’s crematoria, so that the Earth will be liberated from your wickedness and your corruption, and so that the Universe will be blessed in being purged of your abominations. The day will come when an Arab Hitler will rise up against you who will utterly exterminate you and burn you in the oil[-fueled] crematoria, you dogs. [In fact,] it hurts me to compare you to dogs, since dogs are loyal, while you are not. But your conduct is characterized by bestiality and the impurity of dogs…..you will taste the flavor of final surrender which you don’t believe awaits you. Then the fate of wandering dogs will be better than your fate.'”
He sounds like a Canadian university student…
(h/t sassywire, via BCF)
Taxation without representation is bad. What about representation without taxation?
Does anybody knows what the situation is in Canada?
“The Great Prescriptivist
H.W. Fowler’s voice in this reissued classic is a human one, not fettered to a slavish devotion to strict rules of grammar
When he ransacked Henry Watson Fowler’s guide to English usage in 1996, under the guise of preparing its third edition, R.W. Burchfield referred to Fowler’s work as a “fossil.” While “Fowler’s name remains on the title page,” he wrote of his updating of the 1926 volume, which had been lightly revised by Ernest Gowers in 1965, the book “has been largely rewritten.” He called it a mystery why “this schoolmasterly, quixotic, idiosyncratic, and somewhat vulnerable book” has “retained its hold on the imagination of all but professional linguistic scholars.”
Then, having set himself as the fowler and Fowler as the fowl, Burchfield allowed himself a magnanimous gesture of questionable sincerity. “I hope that a way will be found to keep the 1926 masterpiece in print for at least another 70 years.””
“Fowler’s book brims with inspired turns of phrase. The term “pedantry,” he wrote, “is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else’s ignorance.” The word “galore” is “chiefly resorted to by those who are reduced to relieving dullness of matter by oddity of expression.”
But Fowler could also mistake clumsy metaphors for wit. Commenting on an archaic synonym for “if,” he wrote: “The goldfish an’ cannot live in this sentence-bowl unless we put some water in with it, & gasps pathetically at us from the mere dry air of ‘be in a position’ [a reference to an earlier sentence].”
As Crystal says, the 1926 book frequently betrays its age. Fowler prefers “accompanyist” to “accompanist” and “pacificist” to “pacifist.” Of “aggravate” and “aggravation,” he writes: “The use of these in the sense annoy, vex, annoyance, vexation, should be left to the uneducated.””
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/review-a-dictionary-of-modern-english-usage-by-hw-fowler/article1513448/
Lovely reminiscences the Carry On gang brings, Vίtruvius.
They were the first time I had seen naked bosoms in my early teens and those two Blonds were the purveyors of said bosoms.
Jolly good, pip pip and all that.
Buxom babes they were in their day, racy, aaarh.
Saaay no more you old rascal, you.
For those who like pencil art…
http://thisisawesome.com/incredibly-realistic-pencil-drawing/
“Representation without taxation” (10:12)
That’s a great, and apt, line – almost worse than the reverse, isn’t it? When it gets to the point where half of all people don’t pay income tax – and that’s a pretty startling figure – it’s guaranteed that you’re going to hear a lot of loud and angry calls for higher taxes..
Time marches on. The great interregnum is turning out to be a great opportunity for Russia, too:
Exhibit A: In Kyrgyzstan, protesters havee killed Kyrgystan’s Interior Minister Moldomus Kongantiyev and have beaten and taken hostage deputy prime minister Akylbek Zhaparov. Russia’s deputy foreign minister “called for Kyrgyzstan not to use force against the protesters“, saying “We consistently stand for all disagreements – political, economic and social – to be solved within the framework of…democratic procedures…”
Of course you do, Russia.
Exhibit B: “(The) Russian Prime Minister boasted after returning from a visit to Venezuela on Monday that he had sold President Hugo Chavez another $5 billion in weapons — a huge sum for a Latin American army. Hours later (U.S.) State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley was asked for a reaction at his public briefing. First answer: ‘We don’t care….”
Per Maz2’s note: The King’s English, by H. W. Fowler, 1908. Here’s a quote therefrom:
Here’s a sampling of Stanley Unwin’s English, as he expounds speliferously on the matter of early jazz, the white guys who early-ly moved in on it, and disky-recorms in general:
“(Jazz) is the dizziest of a fundamol. Not mark you of a Gillespeed fundamole, O no. There were no recorms vailabold ‘til 1917; these by white perslode…big banders black were doing the jazz-play: Duke Ellingtones, Chick Webber of drumjoy, Charlie Johnson, Fletcher Henderstones, all of whom preceded Count Basics and Jimmy Luncefolder; all of this because peeplodes had a thaucus blacks could play this wild musicolly. But Whiters? Ahem…..there were white musicools like Eddie Condon of guitar’n pluck-it banjold and Bob Crosby’s band; later came-it the Dixieland Musee preservale from Muggsy Spanier’s Ragtoil, leady-hup to a revivy-merge of obscury blacks from limbold quite suddly….”
Holy smokes, that lit up my spell-check like a Christmas tree…
It is indeed a carefully designed shtick, EBD, and in addition I don’t think it could be done without a certain natural talent too. I find it interesting that his shtick seems, to me, to be much more comprehensible in written form that when spoken. I think that this is in part because he employs a labio-lingual band-pass filter in his delivery, which for comedic effect makes him harder to understand than he otherwise would be. And that’s another part of why, I think, one can hear him better upon repetition: because one tunes one’s own receiver filters to better match his transmitter filters.
It reminds me very much of the slanguage (see what I did there?) Anthony Burgess made up for a Clockwork Orange in 1962. It’s interesting: The curious should Google Nadsat Dictionary.
“You should have said so the first time,” EBD ;).
You’re right, Vitruvius, when Unwin is speaking he reduces the volume of carefully selected consonants and slightly emphasizes the vowel sounds in between in order to reduce intelligibility.
When I was a kid he really used to crack my brother and I up. My brother can still do a pretty impressive approximation of Unwin’s shtick, with a few of his own tricks – key syllabic elisions, basically – thrown in to the mix.
Here’s a Reader Tip to put in the entirely foreseeable consequences file:
“About two dozen women marched topless from Longfellow Square to Tommy’s Park this afternoon in an effort to erase what they see as a double standard on male and female nudity.
“The women, preceded and followed by several hundred boisterous and mostly male onlookers, many of them carrying cameras…”
(…)
“Ty McDowell, who organized the march, said she was ‘enraged’ by the turnout of men attracted to the demonstration… (she) plans to organize similar demonstrations in the future, and said she would be more ‘aggressive’ in discouraging oglers.”
(all emph. mine)
Exactly, exetaz, I forgot to mention that Unwin’s shtick was created on purpose, and that he had talent…
/:>˚>
Deep joy in my tumblode! Thanks, EBD, for bringing more attention to one of my favourite entertainers.
Stanley Unwin was an astonishingly clever and yet utterly humble man. Fans of the Small Faces (pre-Rod Stewart, that is) might remember Mr. Unwin’s narration of the story of Happiness Stan from the album Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake.
Wonderful stuff. Many, many thanks.
I think that Wiley Miller‘s take on tits is pretty good, EBD, in the above context.
The Latest Gold Fraud Bombshell: Canada’s Only Bullion Bank Gold Vault Is Practically Empty
http://tinyurl.com/yamwwmw
“”What shocked me was how little gold and silver they actually had.” >>> which is just one tenth of what the Royal Mint of Canada sold in 2008, >>> As Orgen concludes: “The game ends when the people who own all these paper obligations say enough and take physical delivery, and that’s when the mess will occur.”>>>It is funny that central bankers thought they could take the ponzi mentality of infinite dilution of all assets coupled with infinite debt issuance, as they have done to fiat money, and apply it to gold,””
For those who converted investment holdings to gold and didn’t take delivery and put it in your safety deposit boxes … beware!
Can the MSM magically disappear this like the Christmas try.
Muslim Tries to Light a Bomb on DC to Denver Aircraft UPDATE: Fox and others reporting it’s likely a “misunderstanding.”
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/
Big Brother on crack:
Warrant issued for man who owed one penny on parking ticket:
http://www.wftv.com/news/23062671/detail.html
The Fly, I’ve said for years that the difference between a gold stock certificate and what some call “fiat money” is entirely in the mind.
Actually even holding bullion above “fiat money” is a mental exercise and nothing more.
Gold, just like paper currency, is only worth what people imagine it is at any given moment.
You can’t eat gold or use it for shelter or fuel.
It’s just a medium of exchange.
Deep joy indeed. I love this site!
Posted by: Oz at April 7, 2010 10:21 PM
Hold on a minute…naked bosoms? Where can I find out more about this on the internet? Are the text descriptions, like, racy?
one of my favorite Carry On films. took me years to find it because the brain of my youth called it “Carry On Helping Hands” I was 6 at the time.
found it on ebay about 2 years ago.
Caroline Glick on the essential continuity between Bush and Obama policy vis-a-vis Israel and the Middle East.
On the other hand on most issues, there is substantive continuity between Obama’s Middle East policies and those his immediate predecessor George W. Bush adopted during his second term in office. Yet, whereas Israelis viewed Bush as Israel’s greatest friend in the White House, they view Obama as the most anti-Israel US president ever.
[snip]
And yet, when Obama’s personal animus is set aside and one examines the substance of his actual policies, ironically, there is little difference between the current administration’s policies and those of its immediate predecessor.
In his second term in office, Bush ignored the significance of Hamas’s electoral victory in January 2006 and its takeover of Gaza in June 2007. The US expanded its training program for the Palestinian armed forces and pushed Israel to accept a framework for Palestinian statehood that would more or less push it back to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines.
Several paragraphs follow with examples of the extreme disconnect between Bush’s rhetoric and actual policy.
Oz @ 12:16 AM:
“Gold, just like paper currency, is only worth what people imagine it is at any given moment”
Gold is infinately more valuable than debt-issued fait currency or electronic money. It has at a minimum industrial or commercial value and supply limits make it an value-acuring trade medium. It’s money that makes money just sitting in your pocket – without putting it in a bank or other investment risk. And it’s inflation proof!
It isn’t tangible wealth like land, real estate or but the next best thing. The key to gold is to hold it in your hand,,,,not take some bankster;s fraudulent certificate for gold that he does not have. 😉
how wistful this makes me
Spoken like a true believer, the Fly.
I suppose your in up to your eyeballs.
Hey! Correction. (less-than, greater-than marks remove)
.
.
Funny, how we omit certain contexts like…
Barack ( Hussein ) Obama
or
( The Islamic Republic of ) Afghanistan.
(http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1348/Marines-Going-Native-A-Gallery.aspx)
.
.
Liked the opening comments about frisian, being one myself. We get missed when they talk about the angles, saxons and jutes conquering england – but it is the closest continental language there is to english.
I was puzzeled as a kid in class doing well in shakespeare when the anglos couldn’t get it – the sentence structure being so similar.
My ‘dutch’ canadian friends would try and explain to canadians that frisians are the dutch newfies – always liked that.
not a tip but a question. Does anyone remeber a land deal that Peter Milliken was involved in a few years back regarding the purchase of a neighbors property at below market rate?
I’d swear it was him but cannot find any info on it.
Several hundred mostly male onlookers? There must be something really bad in the water of Maine.
I suspect that John Lennon was influenced by Unwin in In His Own Write.
Those Brits!
I was having a few problems deciphering some of the “regular” speech in this clip!
Thanks, EBD!
*
the NEW journalism. apparently they’re
willing… to make housecalls.
*
Oz @ April 8, 2010 12:56 AM
“Spoken like a true believer, the Fly.
I suppose your in up to your eyeballs.”
Snide connotation is unneeded Oz. The money I transfered from cratering mutuals into metals 2 years ago has made my investment more than double in value. While all of the PT Barnum Brokerage’s suckers were forced to leave their diversity investments at high risk in hope of breaking even before they bail, my investment returned upwards of 23% per quarter. I have this investment where I can physically move it or liquidate instead of Barnum brokerage suckers who accepted metal certificates in lieu of delivery. As the economy cools and stagnates further in it’s resistance to fiat stimulus, I will begin transfering metal investment to realty as that market rationalizes further.
So, I’m OK, never done better. The majority aren’t. According to investment Canada most Canadians lost 15-18 % of their investment dollar in the past 2 years. Most of those are “true believers up to their eyeballs” in depreciating or worthless paper.
Ciao!
It appears as though I am about a week late with this tip. However, for those SDA readers who are not already aware of the probable upcoming Supreme Court Challenge regarding Human Rights Commissions in Canada, this article at lifesite may be of interest. One item of interest to me is the fact that the challenge is initiated by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission whose earlier decision was overturned by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeals. There is not yet word whether or not the SCoC will hear the case.
The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission (SHRC) has announced their intention to take their case against Bill Whatcott, a Christian fighting the encroachment of homosexualism, to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Whatcott told LifeSiteNews (LSN) Thursday that the SHRC has informed his lawyer, Tom Schuck, of their intention to appeal the February 25th decision of the Saskatchewan Court of Appeals.
I think it’s time for a Dalton juxtapose??
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100408/national/ont_energy_projects
“Four in 10 Tea Party members are either Democrats or Independents, according to a new national survey. The findings provide one of the most detailed portraits to date of the grassroots movement that started last year.
“The national breakdown of the Tea Party composition is 57 percent Republican, 28 percent Independent and 13 percent Democratic, according to three national polls by the Winston Group, a Republican-leaning firm that conducted the surveys on behalf of an education advocacy group. Two-thirds of the group call themselves conservative, 26 are moderate and 8 percent say they are liberal.”
The Fly, you didn’t understand my comment.
I wasn’t being snide.
Scenario:
Famine stalks the land, people line up weekly for their government issue bag of x-food.
You have an ounce of gold, I have an ounce of Bernard Callebaut chocolate.
I’m now richer than you and your ounce of gold has deflated in value.
Democratic Utopia of Los Angeles Goes Broke on May 5th:
“The city’s Democrat leadership appears to be a model both for the state government in Sacramento and President Obama. Their game plan: spend like drunken liberals; empower public sector unions to rape taxpayers; tax the hell out of everyone; and create vast new bureaucracies to hamstring the private sector.”
(…)
“If there’s one thing history should teach us, it’s that public sector unions need to be outlawed. Unlike unions in the private sector, which are organized to share in the legitimate profits of free enterprise, the public unions exist only to suck the blood of the taxpayer.”
EBD – I fully agree; public sector unions ought to be outlawed.
They have no functional use in enabling workers to provide better service. They are themselves huge corporations that, instead of providing goods or services, act as parasites, living in the host body – the public workers – and feeding off the taxpayers who must ‘feed’ these workers more and more, to keep a decreasing amount of services.
ET: Yeah, it’s a veritable army of rent-seekers. As you point out, government is the biggest business of all, and by many orders of magnitude. It’s pretty much impossible to outlaw the PSUs, though, because the natural advantage they have is increasingly ensconced, to the point where it’s built in to the system itself. Speaking just in the strictly American context, when you combine the power of the public sector – including their out-of-line remuneration – with the fact that almost half of all Americans don’t pay any income tax (“representation without taxation“, as commenter pCp aptly characterized it earlier in this thread) it’s a perfect set up for a mafia-type squeeze on the remaining citizens who pay taxes and whose income isn’t being paid by the taxpayers. Sort of a “the majority has decided that the (slim) minority will pay for everything.” Yikes.
On a not entirely unrelated note,
“The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the presidency. It will be easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to an electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails us. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The republic can survive a Barack Obama. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.”
EBD / ET, re: public sector unions. [and thank you EBD for a most interesting tip thread].
I don’t have the link at hand (I could probably find it) but I read recently that in the US, all-in public sector pay is fully 45% higher than for private sector work of the same kind. Most of us know this very well.
But what was most startling was the claim that the aggregate deficit of 40 states would be ELIMINATED were public sector merely reduced to par with private sector pay. As a libertarian/anarcho capitalist/private property anarchist, I’m not easily astonished by state tyranny, but this I did indeed find astonishing.
At one time I thought public sector unions were just a well-intended mistake. I’ve since come to feel that it was a deliberate and fantastically successful guarantee of an ever growing, expanding state.
Sometimes I think, ‘but surely someday private sector wage serfs swill rise up against this new kind of aristocracy’ but I usually conclude that the much lower paid private sector employee probably feels that he’s up on the deal considering the goodies emanating from the state which the public sector ensures will grow uninterrupted. So perhaps this is the mother of all PPPs (public-private partnerships)!
Further to the public-sector-union discussion:
My wife has just changed jobs from public-sector health care (hospital) to private-sector health care (clinic) and took a 10-20% drop in pay. She reports (anecdotally, of course) that she is servicing easily twice as many patients in the clinic as she was in the hospital.
Public service employees…doing 50% less for 20% more! And a pension to boot!
me no dhimmi – yes, the public sector unions are an enormous drain and set of chains on the economy. They drain off the surplus so that private entrepreneurship capital is non-existent and industrial devt becomes dependent on the goodwill and political cronyism of politicians and The State.
They form as well, an unaccountable workforce, whose products (goods and services) is irrelevant to their work. They receive wages up to twice that of the private sector, plus benefits and pensions two to three times in excess. All of this is extorted from the private sector by their authoritarian rule – eg, they are our overseers by rule of law.
And – they operate as a monopoly; we cannot go elsewhere to register our car, our homes, get our building permit, our health care, our transportation – it’s all in their control.
They are ‘jobs for life’; they can’t be fired, our satisfaction with their work is irrelevant to their pay and promotion and benefits.
It is difficult for the private sector serfs to rise up against this enormous parasite on our backs because it has the force of law and governmental authority behind it.
A simple strike by the Toronto Transit commission or a garbage pickup strike can bring the city to its knees and get these unions their 3.5% yearly wage increases, their accumulation of sick days for a 6 months salary bonus when they leave, their limitation of work hours so that overtime is inevitable..and so on.
A bored ticket collector in a transit booth, with absolutely no skills, no required years of education, no computer skills..nothing..and no work required other than sitting there and handing out tickets, can make over 100,000 a year.
Al Gore’s Weather (AGW): Heheeheee……
…-
“Narwhal numbers good news for Arctic watchers
A Canadian-led team of scientists has supplied a rare piece of good news about Arctic wildlife after developing a new system for counting narwhals that doubles the estimated population of the spiral-tusked marine mammal in Canada’s northeastern waters.
The revised count is particularly encouraging because the narwhal — inspiration for the ancient unicorn myth — was recently identified in an international study as the animal most vulnerable to the impacts of retreating Arctic sea ice, a phenomenon generally viewed as deadliest for polar bears.
Previous population estimates in the Canadian sounds and inlets at the north end of Baffin Island pegged the number of narwhals at no more than 30,000. The latest inventory — which employed a combination of aerial surveys, tracking of tagged animals and new methods for more accurately estimating the number of unseen, diving whales — raises the total estimate to 60,000.”
http://www.canada.com/technology/Narwhal+numbers+good+news+Arctic+watchers/2778308/story.html
“If I had told you Wednesday the story about Anat Kamm, an Israeli journalist charged with espionage, I might have been arrested.”
…-
“Israeli Woman Charged with Espionage”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2489134/posts
REmember Haiti, and the discussions we had on SDA about the value of sending billions to Haiti for the relief effort?
Remember our discussion about the fact that the govt of Haiti is effectively a cabal of about 30 families who economically and politically run that country for their own wealth – while the majority of the population is left without medical care, roads, hydro, water, education – all of which is left up to the charity of outside funding and staff?
Well, here’s the UN’s role.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/04/08/haiti-ruins-relief-workers-live-large-love-boat/
“For the United Nations World Food Program, it was a moment of satisfaction: the U.N.’s flagship relief agency announced on its Web site on March 19 that two gleaming passenger ships had docked in ravaged Port au Prince harbor.
What the Web site announcement did not disclose was that the vessels were intended to house not homeless Haitian refugees, but employees of the U.N. itself. Nor did it publicize the cost of leasing the ships: $112,500 a day. Nor did it mention that one of the vessels is owned by a company closely linked to the government of Venezuelan strongman President Hugo Chavez.”
REmember Haiti, and the discussions we had on SDA about the value of sending billions to Haiti for the relief effort?
Remember our discussion about the fact that the govt of Haiti is effectively a cabal of about 30 families who economically and politically run that country for their own wealth – while the majority of the population is left without medical care, roads, hydro, water, education – all of which is left up to the charity of outside funding and staff?
Well, here’s the UN’s role.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/04/08/haiti-ruins-relief-workers-live-large-love-boat/
“For the United Nations World Food Program, it was a moment of satisfaction: the U.N.’s flagship relief agency announced on its Web site on March 19 that two gleaming passenger ships had docked in ravaged Port au Prince harbor.
What the Web site announcement did not disclose was that the vessels were intended to house not homeless Haitian refugees, but employees of the U.N. itself. Nor did it publicize the cost of leasing the ships: $112,500 a day. Nor did it mention that one of the vessels is owned by a company closely linked to the government of Venezuelan strongman President Hugo Chavez.”