Driven to drink. 1908.

A very short post for now as my internet connection is indescribably bad tonight. I found this poetic advertising from 1908 that I thought was quite appropriate though….

Sunday Times 5 Apr 1908 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article57579207

What an un-PC ad! Can you imagine ever seeing a bit of advertising that encourages the bad-tempered to drink malt whiskey to cure it?!

Yikes! I don’t think the demon drink has ever made a grumpy person feel better about the world, do you?

Anyway, I thought it was appropriate as my temper has been stretched thin by the intermittent internet connection and constant error messages.

If I was a drinker I probably would have been drowning my sorrows and plotting my revenge by now…. grrrrr…. Telstra, I’m talkin’ to you……

Meteorite misses boat. 1908.

What are the chances of this ever happening? The ocean is a BIG place. What do you think the odds are of your boat being in the same place as a falling meteorite? Even luckier, being slightly to the side of the falling meteorite and not directly in its path.

Examiner 2 May 1908 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article38185764

Apparently, on the morning of March 4th 1908, the Dutch steamer Ocean was nearly swamped by huge waves caused by a meteorite falling into the sea nearby.

There is no actual statement in this article telling us who it was on the boat that saw the meteorite falling though.

All that is said is that there were huge waves nearly swamping their boat, and that once Captain Benkert and his crew ventured on deck they found it covered with brown powder that fell from the sky.

Was there really a meteorite, or was it just a big bang followed by huge waves?

So many questions! How did they know it was ‘many tons’? It was just swallowed up by the sea! Meteorites travel at quite a pace, I don’t think you would get a good enough look at it to be able to judge weights, do you? I think there would be more screaming and ducking than fact gathering.

Could it have been some sort of underwater eruption? Not sure about the brown powder though? Any suggestions?

The Leprechaun. 1908.

We have all heard of Leprechauns haven’t we. Tiny and elaborately dressed beings just hanging around with a pot of gold waiting for us to ask them for a share.

West Gippsland Gazette 10 Nov 1908 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article68683945

I have always had a problem with this. Why on earth would they want to share their gold with me? Fairy gold should be guarded by dragons (insert mental picture of Smaug curled over a huge pile of dwarf gold here) not just there for the asking!

This article from County Westmeath in August 1908 tells the story of a strange person who had been seen in the district for some time, mostly by children, and who was assumed to be a leprechaun.

For two months there had been sightings of this mythological being until he was apprehended by two policemen.

That is a surprise because usually these stories end with “and we never saw him again”.

The policemen took this unusual person to the workhouse in Mullingar where he was looked upon with awe and interest by the other inmates.

The workhouse sounds more like a prison-house doesn’t it, with ‘inmates’ and the fact that he was locked up inside and the crowds clamouring for a sighting were locked outside.

This strange person didn’t appear to have much in the way of gold with him, nor was he able to communicate properly either. What was it, I wonder, that made them suggest he was one of the fairy folk? That he was small?

Was he wearing the expected leprechaun garb? I always thought of leprechauns as quite articulate beings too, always ready with a rhyme, or maybe I just read too many fairy tales.

The article also says he was wearing workhouse clothes so I have to wonder what happened to what he was wearing when he was found.

What it seems these policemen found is a person, likely dressed in rags, small of stature and inarticulate, not looking like a leprechaun or guarding a pot of gold. Hmmm… how long was it do you think before they gave up trying to find his pot of gold and just let him ‘escape’?

Butterflies of doom. 1908.

I know you can’t see this article properly. Sorry, but it needs to be there for the sake of credibility.

Examiner 15 Aug 1908 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article38199460

Once I start telling you about a massive swarm of white butterflies whose tiny corpses coated the tracks and caused two tramcars to crash in Florence at midnight in 1908 you will need to know that I am not the one who made it up.

Interestingly, the thing they specify as unusual in this article is the number of butterflies. That is the only thing I don’t have a problem with!

I know at particular times of year some species of butterflies will swarm in their thousands for the purpose of making thousands more.

The thing I don’t believe is that their presence is caused by heat and electricity in the atmosphere, unless they are Frankenstein butterflies.

I also think that usual butterfly behaviour doesn’t see them plummeting from the sky at midnight. I know, I know, plummeting is a little unlikely but I don’t want to think of them as fluttering gently down, alright?

Imagine filling out the insurance claim for that one. Road conditions: ummmm, slippery…

Where are you? 1908, and today.

I liked this article. It seems to be foreseeing the mobile phone doesn’t it?

Ayrton, who appears to be an authority on wireless telephony, posits that advances in technology will mean one day we can call a friend even if we don’t know where he is (not ‘she’ I notice, obviously the location of women should be controlled at all times ;)).

Your friend could be in the depths of a mine, out at sea, or at the top of the Andes, as long as you are both in possession of the same kind of electrical ear, communication will be possible.

The Queenslander 14 Nov 1908 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article23595130

As this article was published in 1908 Ayrton was about 80 years ahead of his time. These days we all have mobile phones and use them to call our friends, mostly for no reason at all. We are rarely calling from such exotic locations as he had hoped, usually the reply to a ‘where are you?’ is ‘on the train’ or ‘ at the shop’ and the call is for unimportant exchanges of information such as ‘do we need milk?’

If only we had as good coverage as he expected, there is no hope of getting a call down a mine, and really, the telcos are kidding themselves if they really think phone coverage in Australia is as good as they tell us, I expect that goes for the rest of the world as well!

When I started writing this post I thought I’d better not have a whinge about bad phone service if I was going to be wrong (even if that is my own experience) but a quick look on the (Australian Government) Department of Broadband and blah blah blah website told me that only 25% of the Australian landmass has mobile phone coverage and suggest buying yourself a satphone if you want it to be better.

Interesting. I know that the Australian population is mainly confined to cities but it is not like 75% of the country has been abandoned. Our population is pretty well spread out! People live everywhere and many of us like driving around for a look. Too bad if we want to use our phones or get internet access while we are doing so!

Sorry about that rant, I will clamber down off my soapbox now and go on with the rest of the post…

The thing that got me on the ‘Where are you?’ train of thought was the world map on my stats page*.

I love looking at my map every day and seeing who in the world is looking at my blog, but I want to know more! Each time I get a view from a new country I am full of questions. Who are you? What bought you to Buried Words and Bushwa? Is there something you were looking for? Please tell me!! I MUST KNOW!!

I have a natural and overwhelming tendency to investigate everything around me, regular readers probably don’t need me to point that out ;), and not knowing why you are all reading is driving me crazy! I really appreciate you reading, don’t get me wrong, I just want to know more!

I understand why Americans, Canadians and those of you from NZ and the UK might read my little Aussie blog, our countries are quite similar and we are all English-speaking. (That said, I would still love to know what part of your country you are from. Do you live in a big city or a town so tiny that even your countrymen have no idea it exists?)

What really makes me crazy is you, person from Iceland, Moldova, Brazil or Indonesia. Are you an expat Aussie or an Aussie on holiday? What about you Egypt, Taiwan or Colombia? I desperately want you to leave a comment so I can satisfy my curiosity!

Cotton Boll did a post on this very subject a while ago called Are things that slow in Monaco? wondering the very same thing. If my pathetic grovelling has moved you to leave a comment here telling me the information I am so hungry for please don’t leave the type of comment I suggested in the comments there :). If you must though, please include an English translation!

________________________________

*If you are not a WordPress blogger, in this stats window individual countries are highlighted when your blog gets a hit from that location.

Killed by Dancing. 1908.

Kalgoorlie Western Argus 30 Jun 1908 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article33278619

This girl would have been perfect for ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ or one of those similar dancing oriented TV shows so common now. She even has a dancers name, Valentine Taravel.

I suspect however, that she didn’t really love to dance but had some sort of compulsive behaviour, or something similar, that caused her to behave in this way.

Poor Valentine, ‘for years her parents attached no particular importance to her passion’. Regardless of whether she really did love dancing or it was some sort of behavioural problem, that is a very sad statement.

I wonder what she really died from. Syncope is fainting. I doubt she just fainted to death, and if dancing all night will kill you there are many club attendees that are not going to be turning up for work on Monday morning. Valentine had spent her entire life dancing after all, a few hours waltzing in the attic would only kill her if she mis-stepped and fell down the stairs. Perhaps she just gave up waiting for a partner.