January 2010
Jane Valentine
Jane Valentine was a tough little Irish woman, a survivor, who died at Avoca Lead in 1897 from exposure and heart failure, hastened by intemperance. She called herself Jane Valentine, although it is doubtful if this was her real name. She is known to have lived around Landsborough from 1866 until 1869. There is conflicting information about the ship she arrived on, possibly fabrications....
Bullocky Bill
As I came down Talbingo Hill I heard a maiden cry, “There goes old Bill the Bullocky - He’s bound for Gundagai.” A better poor old bugger Never cracked an honest crust, A tougher poor old bugger Never drug a whip through dust. His team got bogged on the Five Mile Creek, Bill lashed and swore and cried, “If Nobbie don’t get me out of this I’ll tattoo his bloody hide.” But Nobbie...
Phar Lap
Phar Lap is an improvised bush delicacy, as per Ernestine Hill’s The Territory (1951): They specialised in Phar Laps, wild dog with the hair burnt off, trussed and cooked in the ashes.
Don Bradman
Who is it that Australia races about? Who has won our very highest praise? Now is it Amy Johnson or little Mickey Mouse? No, it is just a country lad who is bringing down the house, And he is our Don Bradman - Now I ask you is he any good? Our Don Bradman As a batsman he can sure lay on the wood. For when he goes in to bat He knocks every record flat For there isn’t anything he cannot...
Truganini
Truganini (1803-76) is the most famous Tasmanian aborigine, but she was not the last. Two women died on Kangaroo Island some time after her death. She was the mistress of G.A.Robinson, Protector of the Aborigines, and helped him round up the remnants of her race and take them to their destruction on Flinders Island. At one stage she went on a murderous rampage in Victoria: her companions were...
Chip Taylor
If you had stumbled into Banjo Jim’s, in the East Village, on a recent Wednesday night and encountered a sixty-something guy leading a band through a fervent rendition of “Wild Thing,” for an audience of two dozen or so, you might have concluded, “This is lame,” and slipped back out the door. But it wasn’t lame, because the sixty-something guy was Chip Taylor, who wrote “Wild Thing,” among many...
Birthdays & athletic performance
“If you visit the locker room of a world-class soccer team early in the calendar year, you are more likely to interrupt a birthday celebration than if you arrive later in the year. A recent tally of the British national youth leagues, for instance, shows that fully half of the players were born between January and March, with the other half spread out over the nine remaining months. On a...
“Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.”
– Anonymous
Presidential facts
We all know the tired old legends and facts – George Washington ‘fessed up to chopping down a cherry tree; Abraham Lincoln lived in a log cabin; JFK had an affair with Marilyn Monroe; Bill Clinton had some laundering issues with a Gap dress. But there’s more than meets the eye with the Presidents – here are a few lesser-known facts about each of them. And in case you’re wondering about the weird...
Inspector Gadget
If you grew up in the ’80s and early ’90s and had access to Nickelodeon, no doubt you found yourself watching Inspector Gadget at one point or another. The cartoon about a bumbling detective and his genius niece Penny and her dog Brain who are constantly saving the day only ran for two seasons, but the reruns lived on (and were popular enough to warrant a 1999 live-action movie).
Because...
Adam Lindsay Gordon
There was a Rabelaisian, Byronic streak in Adam Lindsay Gordon which would have further endeared him to Australians, but examples of his talents in this direction would have found difficulty in surviving the prim Victorian era. A Mount Gambier man was given the following lines many years ago by an 80-year-old drover between Castlemaine and Casterton. The drover said they had been composed by...
“Australians are not given to applauding tragedy unless it is at a distance, like...”
– Geoffrey Dutton
Words
Sundae
Q. Any idea where the word “sundae” comes from? As in “ice-cream sundae”? [David Burry, Montreal] A. Answering this one seemed easy, since the straightforward answer is that “sundae” is no more than a respelling of “Sunday”. But what I didn’t realise is that providing a fuller answer with some context to it was going to drop me...
Words
Drunkard’s cloak
We are in the northern English city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the late 1660s, during the Cromwellian Commonwealth following the Civil War. The city fathers became unhappy, as many municipal authorities had before and many since, with the levels of drunkenness among the local men. Their punishment for the offence was novel. If putting the offender in the pillory or...
Human side to the famous
Fame and history can easily distort the true picture of a man. The human side (and sometimes the bad side) of the famous dead can be forgotten which often contributes to the adulation that many receive. This list looks at 10 very famous and very special people and shows us the normal side of their life.
10 Beady Eyed Ben
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was labeled a security risk by the First...
Thinking literally
The surprising ways that metaphors shape your world
By Drake Bennett, Globe Staff | September 27, 2009
WHEN WE SAY someone is a warm person, we do not mean that they are running a fever. When we describe an issue as weighty, we have not actually used a scale to determine this. And when we say a piece of news is hard to swallow, no one assumes we have tried unsuccessfully to eat it.
These...
100 things we didn't know last year
The most interesting and unexpected facts can emerge from the daily news stories and the Magazine documents some of them in its weekly feature, 10 things we didn’t know last week. To kick off 2010, here’s an almanac of the best from the past year.
1. Using both hands to read Braille achieves an average speed of 115 words a minute, compared with 250 words a minute for sighted reading....
Writing good English →
Buddhism in Afghanistan
From modest beginnings in India in the sixth century BCE, Buddhism spread through Asia and along with it arose a vast chain of Buddhist monasteries that by the seventh century CE provided commercial and diplomatic links throughout the Asian world. This network of monasteries extended from Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan through the steppe country to India, China, Korea and Japan, and then...
Words
Twenty-three Skidoo
Q. Can you please tell us about the popular phrase “23 skidoo” from the “roaring twenties”? [William Mathis] A. It does usually evoke the period of the flappers and speakeasies in the US, though its heyday was really the first decade of the century; by the 1920s it was already rather passé. Today it’s defunct in daily speech, though it is...
Words
Jollop You may know it better as “jalap”, since “jollop” is principally a British spelling. It’s a liquid medicine of some sort, particularly cough syrup or a laxative. “Listen,” said Granny, “If you give someone a bottle of red jollop for their wind it may work, right, but if you want it to work for sure then you let their mind make it work...
Words
Pearls of wisdom
Q. I looked up the word wisdom on your site, and I noticed you did not have the phrase “pearls of wisdom”. I do not know where it came from or any other information about the saying. I have used it when talking about a person’s advice or qualities. [Tonnie LaRue] A. It usually refers to advice or to some sage saying, these being compared to precious pearls...
Words
Manticore This mythical beast is a favourite villain in fantasy stories and games, so much so that it is surely more widely known today than it has ever been. As one example, Harry Potter fans will know that Hagrid bred those nasty blast-ended skrewts from manticores. The manticore was first mentioned in classical Greek writings 2,500 years ago, which reported rumours from the east. This is...
Strange but true
10 Ice Woman
Nature performs many astonishing feats, yet it is a different matter altogether when we human beings push past the boundaries of normal. It was a viciously cold morning in Lengby, Minnesota, when a man discovered his 19-year old neighbor, Jean Hilliard, lying in the snow. Her whole body was frozen solid from the night before, when temperatures dropped twenty-five degrees below...