[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[VHFCN1 Pilots and Crew]

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

Clifton Fadiman

 

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.

Doug Larson

 

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate; now what's going to happen to us with both a Senate and a House?

Will Rogers 

 

If you scatter thorns, don't go barefoot.

Italian Proverb

 

Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know.

Marvin Minsky

 

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

Leonard Bernstein

 

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Losing one’s marbles

 

The earliest example given in the standard references is from It’s Up to You; A Story of Domestic Bliss, by George V Hobart, dated 1902: “I see-sawed back and forth between Clara J. and the smoke-holder like a man who is shy some of his marbles.”

 

That certainly sounds like the modern meaning of marbles, which often refers to one’s sanity. But in an earlier appearance, the writer used it to mean angry, not insane (mad, that is, in the common US sense rather than the British one). It was printed in the Lima News of Ohio in July 1898: “He picked up the Right Honorable Mr Hughes on a technicality, and although that gentleman is reverential in appearance as Father Abraham and as patient as Job, he had, to use an expression of the street, lost his ‘marbles’ most beautifully and stomped on the irascible Harmon, very much à la Bull in the china shop.”

 

The origin must surely come from the boys’ game of marbles, which was very common at the time. To play was always to run the risk of losing all one’s marbles and the result might easily be anger, frustration, and despair. That would account for the 1898 example and it’s hardly a step from there to the wider meaning of mad — to do something senseless or stupid.

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Union

 

“A Good Day for the Union” proclaimed the Ulster Unionist Party’s Web site. Its leader, David Trimble, echoed that statement on Saturday morning at the press conference announcing agreement in the peace talks in Belfast. “The future of the Union has been preserved”, he said. For such a little word, union has a large number of historical and political resonances.

 

None more so than in Northern Ireland, which is the only part of the United Kingdom in which this shorthand name for the country — or as the adjective Unionist — is part of the daily discourse of political life for a large part of the population. Elsewhere in the UK it normally appears only on ceremonial occasions. Our colorful flag may be called the Union Jack (more properly the Union Flag, as every pedant will tell me if I don’t get my blow in first) but to most people in England and Wales Union as a synonym for the United Kingdom is little more than a curiosity. The Acts of Union of 1707 (for Scotland) and 1801 (for what was then the whole island of Ireland) are now ancient legislative history. However, the concept is still highly relevant in Ireland and has also been a matter of intense debate in Scotland recently, which is shortly to elect its own parliament for the first time in 300 years, albeit one with devolved powers only.

 

The word comes from the Latin unus, “one”, which is also the source of our unity and unary (and, among many words beginning in uni-, of unicorn, a beast with only one horn). It seems to have come into English in the middle of the fifteenth century, both in the sense of concord or unity within a country and of a spiritual joining with God. The political connotations of the uniting of separate bodies into one with a single legislature seems to have first been used about proposals to unite Scotland and England, and the names for several other political unions evolved from this sense. In many cases, the term denotes a partial amalgamation of sovereign states into a more-or-less centralised federal body, as with the USA, the old Soviet Union, and, most recently, the European Union, where the word is regarded by many of its opponents as contentious.

 

>From about the 1660s, union began to be used generally for any group of people who came together for some common purpose. In the nineteenth century, it began to be used in particular for an association of workers, in full a trade union. Earlier, the term for such a group had been combination, almost always with the implication of some conspiracy against public order and the public good, as Pepys wrote in his diary in 1668: “Some few ... that do keep out of all plots and combinations”. This negative sense transferred to union after it started to be used in this sense, and in some quarters it is still there.

 

At about the start of the nineteenth century, the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge established unions, primarily debating forums in their original incarnations, their name for which has been adopted for the modern student unions. There are many other current examples of union in the broader sense of an association for some common purpose, including currency union, credit union and rugby union, a form of the sport which provided rather more citations for union in my newspaper last Saturday than did Irish affairs.

 

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President Jimmy Carter's mother said "I'm a Christian, but that doesn't mean I'm a long-faced square. I like a little bourbon." 

 

President Thomas Jefferson was the new U.S nation's first wine expert. 

 

It's impossible to create a beverage of over 18% alcohol by fermentation alone.

 

Temperance activists, who strongly opposed the consumption of alcohol, typically consumed patent medicines that, just like whiskey, generally contained 40% alcohol!

 

Spectators at Indy car races consume more blush wine than the average American, according to interviews of 200,000 adults in the top 75 markets. The interviews also found that golfers drink domestic beer 64% more often than imported beer and that attendees of R&B, rap or hip-hop concerts are 94% more likely than the average person to drink champagne.

 

The word "liquor" is prohibited on storefronts in some states of the U.S. 

 

Letters from “drink to your health” can be used to spell “ideal heart diet.” Drinking alcohol in moderation reduces the risk of heart disease by an average of about 40%.