Quotulatiousness

May 19, 2016

Hundstalag 1 – the canine Hogan’s Heroes prison camp

Filed under: Personal — Tags: — Nicholas @ 16:26

We got a lovely new fence installed recently, so we could allow the dogs to roam around the new backyard without needing to worry that they got off the property. In the interim, before the ground warmed up enough to let the fence contractor dig the post holes, we rented some temporary fence panels and had them set up to close off the gap between the house and the garage, creating a small “courtyard” where the dogs were allowed to wander. The new fence was complete at the end of last week, and the rental company picked up the temporary fence on Tuesday.

The temporary fence shortly after installation in March

The temporary fence

This meant that the dogs have been free to roam the full backyard for just about 48 hours.

In that short time, we’ve had three prison breaks.

Now let me emphasize that this is an excellent fence and that we’re overall very happy with the contractor’s work. But as with any defensive fortification, there are weak spots. The gates, for example, are traditional weaknesses, and breakout number two happened when an electrician opened the gate to ask me a question and both dogs bolted past him and out toward the main street.

Breakouts number one and three were tunnelling jobs.

When the fence contractor finished, I had a walk-around the perimeter with one of the workmen specifically looking for spots where an agile and eager dog could manage to squeeze under the bottom of the fence. We found four such locations and additional measures were taken to close them off.

Despite those measures, we discovered that a Corgi-mix dog can be a very energetic digger:

The escape tunnel, cunningly concealed behind a screen of cedar bushes and the trunk of a tree

The escape tunnel, cunningly concealed behind a screen of cedar bushes and the trunk of a tree

Additional measures had to be taken, and given that it’s effectively invisible from most of the backyard, brute concrete was considered the most appropriate fix:

We're hoping this is sufficient discouragement to keep the canines inside the boundary fence...

We’re hoping this is sufficient discouragement to keep the canines inside the boundary fence…

Suleiman the Magnificent – VI: Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques – Extra History

Filed under: History, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 16 Apr 2016

Suleiman’s decisions came back to haunt him, starting with the Knights of Malta (once Rhodes). He tried to kick them off their island again, but failed. He launched a new campaign to take Vienna and prove the might of his empire. But he was so old…

A messenger disrupted Suleiman in his reverie. He brought news from Malta…

Suleiman had outlived both his friends and his rivals. Charles V had passed, but his throne had passed to a son who proved just as vexing. An ardent Catholic, Philip II set his ships to harass Ottoman fleets in the Mediterranean and emboldened others to dispute Suleiman’s mastery of the sea. The Knights of Malta, whom Suleiman had defeated at Rhodes and allowed to leave peacefully, once again gave safe habor to these Christian ships. Suleiman sent a force to take their island, but his commanders argued with each other and Christian Europe united against him in a way that it could not when he’d been a younger man. The Knights Hospitallier withdrew into their forts. His army struggled for three weeks to take just one of them, and although they succeeded, Suleiman’s commander died and the Christian reinforcements had time to join the remaining two forts. At last, faced with yet another fleet of reinforcements, Suleiman’s commanders decided to withdraw.

Back in his garden, Suleiman knew that this defeat would destroy the invincible image of his empire. He resolved to prove that the Turks were still a force to be feared, and organized a campaign to take Vienna. He would lead them himself. They left in 1566 with great fanfare, but they were immediately greeted by torrential rains that slowed their advance and cost them materiel. Suleiman spent the whole trip confined to a carriage, and when they finally arrived to siege Szeged, he had to retreat a sickbed in his tent. He died while the battle still raged outside, never to know his empire’s fate.

QotD: A contrarian view of “Britain in decline”

Filed under: Britain, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… it is not a bad time to remind ourselves how lucky we are to live on this damp little island.

I don’t mean this in a jingoistic way, and certainly when you look closely there is little to recommend Henry V’s brutal French raid. What there is to celebrate, of course, is Shakespeare’s poetic rendering of the campaign. It is our literary, scientific, technological, economic, political and philosophical achievements, rather than just our military milestones that we should occasionally pause to remember, amid our usual self-criticism.

All my life I have been told that Britain is in decline. But stand back and take a long, hard look. Even by relative standards, it just is not true. We have recently overtaken France (again) as the fifth largest economy in the world and are closing on Germany. We have the fourth largest defence budget in the world, devoted largely to peace-keeping. We disproportionately contribute to the world’s literature, art, music, technology and science.

We have won some 123 Nobel prizes, more than any other country bar America (and more per capita than America), and we continue to win them, with 18 in this century so far. In the field of genetics, which I know best, we discovered the structure of DNA, invented DNA fingerprinting, pioneered cloning and contributed 40 per cent of the first sequencing of the human genome.

On absolute measures, we are in even better shape. Income per capita has more than doubled since 1965 — in real terms. In those days, three million households lacked or shared an inside lavatory, most houses did not have central heating and twice as many people as today had no access to a car. When they did it was expensive, unreliable and leaked fumes.

In the 1960s even though there were fewer people in Britain, rivers were more polluted, the air was dirtier, and there were fewer trees, otters and buzzards. Budget airlines, mobile phones, search engines and social media were as unimaginable as unicorns. Sure, there was less obesity and fewer traffic jams, but there were more strikes, racism and nylon clothing. People spent twice as much of their income on food. There may be political angst about immigrants, but Britain is far more at ease with its multicultural self today than we might have dared to hope in the 1960s.

Matt Ridley, “Britain’s Best Years”, MattRidley.com, 2015-01-01.

Powered by WordPress