'The steam over the frog pond is merely fog'

The intention of fluoridation was to protect aluminium and fertiliser industries from law suits over pollution from their plants.

The danger of fluoride was kept from the public when fluoride was used to develop the atom bomb in the Manhattan Project. Check out the indisputable, verifiable evidence from such sites as fluoridealert.org and associated links. There is no excuse not to.

Otherwise go back to sleep. All is well. The steam over the frog pond is merely fog.

- Anti-fluoridation activist Owen Carson, letter to the Southland Times, 11 June 2013 (excerpt)

See also:
News: The dying art of conversation in Northland, Stuff, 6 June 2013
News: 'I hate onions with a furious passion', Waitaki Herald, 30 November 2012
Blog: Hold the front page!, 20 May 2012

Thatcher in office

[Margaret] Thatcher arrived in office in May 1979 more clearly defined by what she wouldn’t do than by what she would. She was the alternative to two approaches to politics that had both run out of road. One was consensus: at various points during the traumas of the 1970s it was mooted that only a national government of all the parties and all the talents could save the country (the octogenarian Harold Macmillan apparently spent much of the decade waiting for the call to lead such an administration, which goes to show what an unrealistic idea it was). Thatcher’s solid parliamentary majority of 43 put a stop to all such talk, at least for the time being. The other was confrontation: the Winter of Discontent had tested to destruction the idea that a managed wage policy could produce anything other than permanent antagonism between the government and the union movement, as each looked to see how far it could push the other. Thatcher’s alternative to both consensus and confrontation is conventionally understood to have been monetarism. A Thatcher government would withdraw from the industrial battlefield and focus its attention on tightening the money supply in order to attack the primary cause of inflation. Wage policy would be a matter for individual employers to determine, with the state’s role limited to enforcing the rule of law (beefed up where necessary) in any confrontations that might ensue. The government would not seek industrial agreement but neither would it attempt to impose its will by fiat. It would take a step back to create the monetary framework within which sustainable economic growth could be achieved without constant derailment by pressure-group politics and crisis management. The conventional understanding is, however, wrong. It is true that Thatcher was determined not to have a wage policy and she stuck to that. It is also true that she had an initial go at monetarism. But she didn’t stick to that. It turned out that her alternative to both confrontation and consensus was simply another sort of crisis management: she made it up as she went along.

Thatcher’s personal attachment to monetarism was never very steady. She was no economist: as one of her advisers put it, she was ‘good on finance … not good on economics’. She had read the high priest of monetarism, Milton Friedman (she and members of her shadow cabinet had met with him often), and she knew she wanted the same things he wanted: sound money, an end to stagflation, limits on government profligacy. But he was far from sure that she understood his prescription for getting there. There was one thing she liked even less than high inflation and that was high interest rates. They unnerved her because she felt she had direct experience of their effect on small businesses and ordinary families, especially those with mortgages. Her government’s first foray into controlling the money supply included punitively high interest rates, which made her uncomfortable. They also made Friedman uncomfortable because he thought this was the wrong way to tackle the problem: in his universe it was doing things back to front to use interest rates to control the money supply rather than acknowledging that the rate of interest simply reflects the supply of and demand for money. Friedman wanted the Bank of England to print less of the stuff and let things take their course from there. But Thatcher did not have the time or the political patience to let things take their course. Her tough monetary stance had had the unintended side-effect of boosting the value of sterling, so making it much harder for British industry to export. Within a year of coming to Downing Street her government was presiding over rapidly rising unemployment, stubbornly high inflation, an expanding money supply, sky-high interest rates and falling exports. It was time to try something else.

This is what she did in the autumn of 1980. Just as she was making her famous ‘The lady’s not for turning’ speech to the party conference, the lady turned. She wanted lower interest rates. She also wanted a more competitive currency. Her government, under the direction of her chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, returned to traditional methods of exchange rate management through adjustments to interest rates and fiscal policy, hoping to patch together a short-term fix to get her over the worst. At the same time, she didn’t want to signal any weakening of resolve. She turned her personal attention to getting the spending of government departments under control. This was much more her style.

- David Runciman, London Review of Books, 6 June 2013, reviews Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. Vol.1: Not For Turning, by Charles Moore.

See also:

Blog: Anticipating the funeral of Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 14 April 2013

Blog: 'This Monty Python, is he one of us?', 8 October 2010

Music: The Specials - Ghost Town

Insanity laughs under pressure

Freddie Mercury and David Bowie's performance of 'Under Pressure', with the music stripped away electronically is an intriguing glimpse at two rival vocalists at the top of their game. The original was released as a single in 1981 and appeared on Queen's 1982 album Hot Space, and numerous Bowie compilations. As a single it topped the charts in the UK, the Netherlands and Argentina - the latter during the Falklands conflict, to the consternation of General Galtieri.

Nicholas Pegg in The Complete David Bowie (2000) thinks that the battle of wills and voices between Mercury and Bowie seesaws back and forth through 'Under Pressure', lending the speedily thrown-together track a rare magic:

Throughout, the pendulum repeatedly swings between Bowie's preening art-rock and Queen's pumped-up glam. This is the track's strength: it sounds like both a duet and a duel. "To have his ego mixed with ours was a very volatile mixture," said Brian May later, recalling that Bowie was "very aloof" during the session; "It made for a very hot time in the studio." An interesting qualification of that memory is provided by Bowie's particular friend in the group, Roger Taylor, who said in 1999 that "We'd never actually collaborated with anybody before, so certain egos were slightly bruised along the way."

[Via Reddit]

The dying art of conversation in Northland

A 19-year-old convict on home detention is serving the final month of his sentence in prison because he found home life too boring.

In an interview with Marcus Lush on RadioLive this morning, Whangarei Senior Constable Paul Nicholas told of how the Whangarei teen - 10 months into an 11-month sentence of home detention - called police when it finally came to be too much.

Begging to be allowed to spend the rest of his sentence in prison, he threatened to remove his electronic monitoring bracelet if police didn't oblige.

Nicholas told Lush if the man had removed his ankle bracelet, police would have been forced to arrest him anyway for breach of his conditions.

He said it was an "odd" situation.
"It's the first time I've ever come across it... Perhaps he should have brought a PS3," he told Lush [...]

The teen is now spending the next month at the Ngawha Prison in Northland.

- 'Prison more interesting than home', Stuff.co.nz, 6 June 2013

See also:

News: Cutting out the middle man, 9 April 2010

News: Jailers & derailleurs, 28 May 2009

News: Most entertaining use of the word 'dog' in a judicial context, 11 July 2005

The Beatles logo

Ringo records 'She Loves You', 1 July 1963 (via TheBeatles.com)

Backstage in Boston, two hours before the gig, Paul McCartney is doing what he does best - reliving the glory days. It is August 2009. He has just soundchecked at Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, where, in front of an audience of eighty, he played songs he remembered from the Cavern Club and Abbey Road. 'And this is a new one,' he announced, as he began singing 'Yesterday' [...]

McCartney said he had always been fascinated by the appearance of things. A few weeks after his Boston show, his old band would make their first appearance in a video game, The Beatles: Rockband, which involves playing along to Beatles songs on plastic instruments and scoring points for how well you can strum with George or keep pace with Ringo. This game was being packaged with huge posters showing the band around the time of A Hard Day's Night. The font used to display the band's name looks like the one the band used at the time: thick black letters, small spiky serifs, the large boastful B at the start, that long T that extends below the baseline of the other capitals.

This was the logo-type that Ringo pounded behind on his bass drum skin when they played Shea Stadium in August 1965, the one that came up for auction at Sotheby's in August 1989, the logo that attached itself to most of the repackaging and merchandising after their split. The video game designers have adapted it slightly for the drumkit that comes with their game: the B is taller, the counter space in the B and the A is larger, and the bottom curl on the S has lost its serif and instead snakes devilishly towards a fine point.

'It wasn't a typeface,' McCartney says. 'I think I drew it when I was at school. I used to sit around endlessly with notebooks, drawing Elvis, drawing guitars, drawing logos, drawing my signature. At that sort of time we were starting the Beatles and I think in my drawings I hit upon the idea of having the T long. It's not going to do me any good to really claim that, but it's quite possible'. Others have also claimed credit - Ivor Arbiter, the London drum shop owner who claims to have designed it for £5, and sign painter Eddie Stokes who worked for Arbiter painting drum skins in his lunch hour. Whoever was responsible, it seems likely that the main subconscious influence on the look of the letters came from Goudy Old Style - which would place the nameplate of the most famous English pop group of all time firmly in the heritage of early twentieth-century America.

- Simon Garfield, Just My Type: a book about fonts, London, 2010, p.269-272 (links & pic added) 

See also:
Music: Jarvis Cocker reviews The John Lennon Letters, 10 October 2012
Music: Paul McCartney in Hyde Park, 4 July 2010
Movies: Review - Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy, 10 February 2010

The 'legendarily nasty' CBGB toilets

The breakout star of “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” the new fashion exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is neither the maverick designer Vivienne Westwood nor modern punks like Gareth Pugh and the sisters of Rodarte, but a toilet. At the show’s entrance, visitors are immediately confronted with a re-creation of a filthy restroom of CBGB, the Bowery club that was one of the birthplaces of punk, as it would have appeared in the mid-1970s — drawing reactions, at least among those who remember the original facilities, ranging from amazement to ire. There are three urinals, two toilets with the seats up, two sinks, a bare light bulb, a brick wall, countless used cigarette butts and a whole lot of graffiti, mostly the names of the bands that performed at the club.Patti Smith once said “all the action happened in the toilets,” according to Andrew Bolton, the curator of the exhibition, and it is a place where history is literally written on the walls.

The re-creation of the graffiti is based on images taken in the 1970s by the photographer David Godlis, who documented the New York rock and punk scenes. Several band names indicate that this is how the bathrooms would have looked shortly after 1976, when Dead Boys, a punk band managed by CBGB’s owner Hilly Kristal, first played at the club.

Debbie Harry said the walls resonated with the voices of CBGB. “The messages from all of them were greetings and calls to be recognized by anyone who stepped into the zone of clandestine fulfillment that existed on the Bowery and especially at CB’s during the punk years,” she wrote by e-mail. “The tradition of writing on bathroom walls wasn’t particular to those toilets, but the ferocity was definitely related to the club, the music and all the people who went there.”

Visitors have wondered about the lack of privacy, but Jimmy Webb, the manager at Trash and Vaudeville, recently recalled that it was common to see both genders using the toilets for their intended purposes and for illicit ones. “There literally were no barriers, so anything and everything went, and I don’t mean that in a negative way,” he said. “You would see the most beautiful people in there, and there wasn’t much difference from Studio 54, except for the culture.”

David Byrne described the toilets as “legendarily nasty.”

Fran Lebowitz paid a visit to the restroom “for less than a minute,” she said in an interview this month. “By the way, there wasn’t a huge difference between the cleanliness of the bathroom and the rest of the place.”

- Eric Wilson, 'A Necessary Stop', New York Times, 29 May 2013