Conrad Hilton was very generous to me in the divorce settlement. He gave me 5,000 Gideon Bibles.

 

When I was starting my climb up the greasy pole of the financial services industry I had to spend a lot of time travelling which, inevitably, meant spending nights away in some soulless hotel room. Once I had checked in I would survey the room to familiarise myself with its layout and the facilities that it offered. Going through the drawers of the bedside cabinet, I would inevitably come across the Gideon bible and a telephone directory – the hotelier’s attempt to create a Desert Island Discs’ atmosphere. The Gideon – or the Osborne as I prefer to call it – is ubiquitous, some 1.5 billion languishing in darkened corners of hotel rooms around the world. And very useful they were too – for stabilising the inevitable wonky hotel room furniture, for eliminating the howling draft rushing through the ill-fitting doors or for exacting revenge on annoying insects and lepidoptera that had the audacity to disturb your repose.

Gideon was a biblical character, chosen by the Christian God to free the people of Israel and became a symbol of a man of faith who was willing to do as God commanded, irrespective of his personal views of the likely outcome. There is no real secret as to why the Gideon bibles are there – they are distributed for free by Gideons International.

The origin of the Gideons is more interesting. One day in 1898 two travelling businessmen, John H Nicholson and Samuel E Hill, arrived at a busy Central Hotel in Boscobel, Wisconsin, looking for accommodation for the night. There was only one room available – presumably the stable was occupied – and so they decided to share. They got chatting and discovered they both shared a deep religious faith and, as you do when you are holed up with a stranger in some god-forsaken hotel room, decided to create an evangelical association for Christian businessmen.

Their initial meeting only attracted one other person, William J Knights – remember this was in the era before Facebook and other social media – and so they decided to name their association after Gideon who led a small band to overcome a larger enemy. They hit upon the idea of distributing Bibles as a way of proselytising their message. The first hotel to receive their bible was the Superior Hotel in Superior, Montana in 1908 and the rest is history.

The Bibles follow a standard format – a short preface, a handy index of key texts for all occasions, a translation of John 3.16 in a variety of languages and scripts, the bible text itself – either New Testament or the full monty, usually the King James version – and a place for the reader to attest their belief in Jesus the saviour – or in my experience to note that Kilroy was here.

Of course, in these godless times there has been some reaction to the ubiquity of the Gideon bible. Last year a hotelier, Wayne Bartholomew, gained some notoriety by replacing the Gideon bible with copies of Fifty Shades of Grey (the wag!) and other trendier establishments are replacing the physical book with e-readers. With the advent of tablets and smart phones we bring our own entertainment with us and so it is only the techno-phobes or desperate who now resort to the book for their entertainment.

Still, next time you check into a hotel you now know the story behind the Bible in your bedroom cabinet.              

What Is The Origin Of (27)?….

 

Playing Ducks and Drakes

This rather quaint phrase has the connotation of playing fast and loose and of behaving recklessly.

As a child whenever I was by the shoreline of an expanse of water I was always tempted to practise my skills of skimming stones. You need to select a flattish stone, the flatter the better, and in a crouching position throw the stone at a low trajectory with the aim of getting it to bounce across the surface of the water. Usually the result was catastrophic failure – the first contact with the water’s surface meant that the stone sank without trace. Occasionally, the stone would jump a couple of times across the surface – result, boyish satisfaction! Astonishingly, there is a World Stone Skimming Championship – this year to be held on 29^th September on Easdale Island near Oban – and the world record seems to be 51 skips set by Russell Byars on July 19, 2007.

What I hadn’t appreciated in my schoolboy innocence was that the old English name for stone skimming was ducks and drakes. The nomenclator or remebrancer of Adrianus Junius which was translated into English in 1585 describes the game thus, “A kind of sport or play with an oister shell or stone throwne into the water, and making circles yer it sinke, etc. It is called a ducke and a drake, and a halfe-penie cake.”  Often the game was described as making ducks and drakes rather than playing ducks and drakes, as can be seen from this extract from a play entitled Dick of Devon from 1626, “The poorest ship-boy Might on the Thames make duckes and drakes with pieces Of eight fetchd out of Spayne”. Probably the ripples made by the skipping stones were thought to resemble those made by ducks splashing in the water.

Delightful as spending your time skimming stones may be, particularly if there are untold riches to be had by being World champion, nonetheless to the majority of the population it might be seen as a feckless pursuit. Certainly, James Cooke in his Tu Quoque of 1614 likens it to tossing money away, “This royal Caesar doth regard no cash; Has thrown away as much in ducks and drakes As would have bought some 50,000 capons.” The connection between skimming stones and an idle feckless lifestyle had been made.

At some point in the intervening centuries the meaning of the phrase moved away from the connotation of idle squandering to that of being unreliable and reckless. Perhaps it was simply by extension – if you are prone to squandering money then that characteristic may be indicative of a general propensity to being reckless. Alternatively it may be that the particular meaning ascribed to playing fast and loose was conflated with playing ducks and drakes. Either way, this phase has a fascinating origin.

 

Rural Rides (9)

 

St Michael’s Mount

If Trebah Garden was the jewel of the gardens we visited recently, St Michaels’ Mount, a National Trust property, was without doubt the outstanding historic pile. It is situated just off the coast by Marazion which is on the southern coast of Cornwall near Penzance. It is positioned on top of a great granite outcrop in the bay which, when the tide is out, turns into a mudflat.

Depending upon the situation of the tides when you arrive, you either get there by boat (£2 a person per one-way trip – nice business if you can get it) or walk across the causeway. The bay drains like a sink when the tide retreats. When we visited we went by boat and returned on foot. The climb from the harbour to the castle is arduous but well worth the effort.

In Cornish the area was known as Carrack Looz en Cooz which translates to the grey rock in the wood and before the Bay was flooded by the sea the outcrop was likely to have been surrounded by marsh trees. It is thought that St Michael’s Mount is the island of Mictis mentioned in Pliny The Elder’s Naturalis Historia (4.16.104) and was a flourishing trading port used to export tin and copper between 400 BCE and 400 CE.

There has been a religious settlement atop of the rock since around the 8^th century and a monastery was built there in the 12^th century only to be destroyed by an earthquake in 1275. The priory church was rebuilt and is still standing and in use. The site has seen a lot of action – it was captured by Henry Pomeroy on behalf of Prince John in Richard 1’s reign, by John de Vere who then, in 1473, withstood a 23 week siege by Edward IV’s troops and then by the pretender Perkin Warbeck. In 1549 the governor of the Mount, Humphrey Arundell, led a rebellion from there whilst during the Civil War, Sir Arthur Basset held out against the Parliamentarians until July 1646.

When the tsunami caused by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 struck the Cornish coast, the sea around the Mount rose 6 feet in 10 minutes and then ebbed as quickly, a phenomenon which was repeated for around 5 hours.

The Mount was given to the National Trust by the 3^rd Baron St Levan together with a large endowment in 1954 with the St Aubyn family retaining the right to live there, provided that the hoi polloi were allowed to tramp around.

The castle has a fine collection of armour, furniture and paintings and there are stunning views of the Bay and the sea to be had from each of the rooms. Visitors can also visit the gardens which boast a magnificent collection of alpine plants, clinging desperately on to the rock face. Irritatingly, you have to descend all the way down from the castle to get to the gardens which necessitates another climb – you certainly get fit here!

The island has its own underground railway, built in 1900, which is used to convey goods up and down to the castle but that is not open to the public.

Stunning and breathtaking are the only words to describe St Michael’s Mount and you leave the site amazed that a castle and priory could have been built up there.

 

What A Way To Go – Part Eleven

 

Continuing our occasional series on unusual (and amusing) deaths.

Being President of the United States doesn’t make you immune from the attentions of the grim reaper. Take the case of Zachary Taylor. After a particularly warm Independence Day celebration in 1850 he went home and raided the family ice box for something to snack on. He selected some iced milk and some cherries. Almost immediately, he fell ill and within five days was dead. There are a number of theories centring around the cause of the unfortunate Taylor’s death – some even thought he had been poisoned – but it seems more likely that it was either because the milk contained some deadly bacteria or that the combination of the acidic cherries with the milk was too much for Taylor’s sensitive stomach. Either way, the moral of the story is to be very careful what you put in your mouth as the demise of George M Prior demonstrates.

Prior was a Navy Lieutenant and spent his shore leave playing golf at the Army Navy Country Club in Arlington, Virginia. He exhibited symptoms of nausea after the first day of golf and by the end of the third day had a high temperature and a rash. Prudently, George admitted himself to hospital and whilst there large blisters appeared. Within ten days or so he was dead with eighty per cent of his body covered in burns and blisters. Upon investigation, it appeared that Prior habitually put his golf tee into his mouth. Unfortunately, in order to maintain its pristine condition, the course had been sprayed with fungicide. Our golfer had an allergic reaction to the fungicide which burned his skin from the inside out and caused his major organs to fail.

I am the last person to be accused of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. A little bit of what you fancy does you good, I always say. To illustrate the point that Aristotle’s golden mean – moderation in everything – is the way to live your life, consider the demise of Basil Brown in 1974. Brown was committed to healthy living and drank a gallon of carrot juice a day and took excessive amounts of Vitamin A when he couldn’t get enough of the juice. His zealous pursuit of the healthy lifestyle was his undoing – he died from hypervitaminosis A, a massive overdose of Vitamin A that caused his liver to shut down.

People do the strangest things to win a prize. Edward Archbold, along with 30 others, entered a competition to win a python. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I admit. The competition required the contestants to eat a variety of insects – a sort of early forerunner of I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. Having chomped his way through a large number of cockroaches, two ounces of mealworms and 35 horn worms – a type of caterpillar – Archbold, not surprisingly, collapsed. On admittance to hospital he was pronounced dead. Cause of death – his airway was blocked by the body parts of the insects he had consumed!

You have been warned!

 

It’s The Way I Tell ‘Em (3)

 

More high-brow jokes courtesy of the Independent:

• How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change.
• Why do Marx and Engels drink herbal tea? Because proper tea is theft.
• What did the proton say to the ever-grumpy electron? “Why do you have to be so negative all the time?”
• Two atoms are walking down the street. One atom says to the other: “Hey! I think I lost an electron!” The other says: “Are you sure?” “Yes, I’m positive!”
• Why is it so difficult to explain bad puns to kleptomaniacs? Because they always take things so literally.
• A Higgs boson walks into a church. The priest says, “Get out, you blasphemer. How dare you call yourself the ‘God particle’?” The Higgs boson replies: “But I make up the mass.”
•  How many Microsoft designers does it take to change a lightbulb? None – they just define darkness as “industry standard.
• Two behaviourists meet in the street. One says to the other: “You’re OK. How am I?”
• How many Freudians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? It takes two, one to screw in the lightbulb, and one to hold the peni-, fathe-, LADDER!
• A woman comes home to find her string theorist husband in bed with another woman. “But honey,” he says, “I can explain everything!”
• A student travelling on a train looks up and sees Einstein sitting  next to him. Excited, he asks:  “Excuse me, professor. Does Boston stop at this train?”
• And finally (for now), a biochemist walks into a student bar and says to the barman: “I’d like a pint of adenosine triphosphate, please.” “Certainly,” says the barman, “that’ll be ATP.”