FEEDBACK understands the motivation for expressing unfamiliarly large quantities in blue whale units, and so forth (19 June 2010). But what can have been going through the mind of a journalist on the New Zealand Herald? That paper published on 19 August the news that âthe Manawatu Gorge is likely to be closed for a week after a slip reported to be âbigger than Ben-Hurâ came down last night following heavy rain.â
Mike Kean asks whether road contractors in his country are âso slow that a Charlton-Heston-sized slip takes a week to clear?â That led us to the invaluable discovery of â a website dedicated to answering our next question: how tall was Heston? Apparently, 1.9 metres when he played Ben-Hur.
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Or would the comparison be to the film itself? Itâs 212 minutes long, which is 7270 metres of 70-millimetre film, not counting any overlaps between reels. That would be a long landslide. Or are we to compare the landslide with the most famous scenes, set in a stadium in Roman Jerusalem (Aelia Capitolina) â which very likely had no stadium?
âAn email informs Freya Savidge that by completing a survey she can âearn up to 0 pointsâ. She is concerned. Does this mean they may take points away?â
MEANWHILE Graham de Vahl Davis tells us that the August issue of Choice, the publication of the , that Malaysian and Indonesian orang-utan habitats are being destroyed, as forests are cleared to make way for palm tree plantations, at the rate of 300 soccer fields a day.
Should the agile orange primates, called in Malay âmen of the forestâ, form some teams, before itâs too late?
MELBOURNE, Australia, has an even less zoologically correct unit of large mass. Road safety signs there say, âIf a rhinoceros on a giant skateboard was headed your way, youâd get out of the way, right?â That we would, just before trying to enumerate last nightâs refreshment in detail. âWell, guess what,â it goes on, âa tram weighs about the same as 30 rhinosâŠâ
Howard Arber wonders âhow many rhinoceroses could fit in a tramâ, which makes all the difference to the conversion to blue whale units.
IT DID mean something after all. We couldnât understand the import of a sign in an Australian polling station saying âAbsent voters queue hereâ (15 January). A person going by the nickname Catprog sends us a quote from the Australian Electoral Commissionâs ââ, explaining: âAbsent vote: Electors who are out of their division but still within their home State or Territory, may cast an âabsent voteâ at any polling place in that State or Territory.â Thatâs a relief to know.
THE âConfidential Intelligence Briefingâ supplement to The Week magazine, Cary Seidman reports, contains an article entitled âHow Darwinism will create a conservative dynasty in Americaâ, which considers the âprofound implications for what kind of society we leave our ancestorsâ. Time to read Darwin again, then.
Strange ways of the City of London
LAZY Sunday afternoon â and itâs time for a colleague to browse an east London local councilâs free newspaper for planning applications. One catches the eye: âProposed development of 38-40 Trinity Square⊠any owner of the land or tenant who wishes to make representationsâŠâ And âtenantâ is footnoted. The colleague, being a Feedback reader, reads the footnote: ââtenantâ means a tenant of an agricultural holding any part of which is comprised in the landâ.
We sort of understand why, legally, this had to be included â in the same sort of way we understand, quantum mechanically, that the electron goes through both slits. Perhaps there was an agricultural tenant at some point. But the land in question is a stoneâs throw from the Tower of London (started AD 1080) and even closer to â on the inside of â a surviving fragment of the wall enclosing Roman Londinium (about AD 220).
It is, to be fair, possible that there was agricultural use around AD 500, when Londinium seems to have fallen into desuetude: we make a note to ask an archaeologist. Itâs likely, though, that this site has been continuously urban for 2000 years.
But then the penny drops. This is legal language. It concerns the City of London. What are the tax advantages of being an âagricultural tenantâ there, we wonder.
AND finally: the Bow district in Londonâs East End has never been reputed for its slavish adherence to laws. It was here, for example, that Sylvia Pankhurst chose to launch her anti-war and pro-working-class feminist movement by lobbing a flint through a funeral directorâs window in February 1913. She got headlines in the papers.
Itâs not an enormous surprise, then, to see a sign in a taxi office there: âDriverâs wantedâ.
Since the office in question is next to the courthouse, which is across the road from the police station, the question must be: why has the sign been there for a year or more? Could it be that the local forces of law and order have become complacent about breaches of the laws of punctuation (30 April)?
