Factlet (16)

The Canadian Dollar
   I don't have much time this morning, but I will attempt two things. The first is to provide the image above which will haunt us for a long time. It is from the cover of the Atlantic, which was published during the month of halloween in 2024. 
   The coach arrived in Washington, Canadians are spooked and the loonie is sinking. For some perspective on how low it can go, here is the Factlet:
The Canadian $
Jan. 21, 2002: 61.79 cents
"The dollar fell to its all-time low on Jan. 21, 2002, according to the Bank of Canada, hitting 61.79 cents US. (Over the next several years, the dollar climbed upwards until it reached its all-time high of $1.103 US on Nov. 7, 2007."
This Factlet is a few years old, but the numbers for the low and high Canadian dollars are likely correct.
  As for the word "Factlet", new readers can see the origin of the term in the post that revealed what a Gee-Gee is. The most recent one is about Maurice Maeterlinck, but, after re-reading it, I am not sure what the actual Factlet is. It may be that Maurice wrote The Life of Termites. I was clearer in the one about Balzac, he loved pears. Perhaps a more useful Factlet is #3, which is depressing to read at this time of year since it revealed in 2019 that "90,000 Packages Disappear Daily in N.Y.C." 

Scissors and Spelling

 Factlet 13 - There are Over 480 Ways to Spell 'Scissors'

   I have not posted in a while, nor have I presented another Factlet. I thought of this one because I just saw an ad for scissors as illustrated below:

The ad reminded me of the page provided below which is the 59th one in Schott's Quintessential Miscellany (of which, by the way, I became aware only after choosing the title: Mulcahy's Miscellany.)

This photo is not a very good one, but I assure you Schott does present all 480 spellings on the page which is found in a very small book. The book by Barrow he refers to is this one: To the Curious; The Word Scissars Appears Capable of More Variations in the Spelling than any Other, T.T. Barrow. 

Sources, etc.

  The ad was spotted in a recent issue of The New Yorker. 
The site found at the scissor maker Ciselier is worth a look and they even have their own blog.
The source for the page provided above was given, but you should know that there are other Schott's: Schott's Original Miscellany; Schott's Food and Drink Miscellany and Schott's Sporting Gaming and Idling Miscellany. They are small books containing large amounts of information. For example in Schott's Quintessential... you will find the names of all of Churchill's pets and all of the addresses at which he (and they) lived. 

For the last three fascinating factlets before this one see: A Few More Factlets.

The Bonus: 

  The Canadian Spelling Bee Championship ended yesterday, but you are not too late for the U.S. "Bee Week" which is going on now. It is interesting that, although spelling English words correctly can be difficult, most of the recent champions in spelling bees have names which don't appear to be English.

Match Making

Factlet (13)

   This is not about what you think, it is about matches. Back when many people smoked, matches were needed and the line uttered by Lauren Bacall to Humphrey in To Have and Have Not, "Anybody got a match?," was often heard.  One of my sisters had huge glass containers and vases full of colourful matchbook covers. Now you rarely seen them and only infrequently get asked, "Buddy, got a light?"

   I thought of those match-filled days of long ago when I ran across this paragraph which provides the Factlet(s):

"For this tree [Western White Pine], almost exclusively now [c1949], yields us our wooden matches. Formerly they were made from the Eastern White Pine, but as the first growth of that species approached exhaustion, the western species, its closest relative and similar to it in the physical and chemical properties of its wood, began (from about 1914 on) to bear the whole burden of matchwood production. This may not seem a great drain - a match so slight a thing - but remember that twelve thousand wooden matches are struck, by the American people, every second. That makes more than 103 million in twenty-four hours. To produce a year's supply of matches, three hundred thousand mature pines must yield up their lives. If grown to a pure strand, they would cover an area 2 miles wide and 10 miles long."

   I suppose that one could view all of this as "progress" since fewer trees are being cut down to provide matches.  On the other hand, less trees are being used to produce newsprint and that is not good. Trees grow back, but newspapers are unlikely to return, even in digital form.

Source:

   That paragraph will be found on p.38 of A Natural History of North American Trees, by Donald Culross Peattie. It's a much more interesting book than the title indicates. See my post about Peattie. 

   If you are interested in the disappearance of the ordinary objects we grew up with see: Going Going Gone: Vanishing Americana by Susan Jones & Marilyn Nissenson. Among the things that have gone: Bank Checks; Carbon Paper; DDT; Girdles; Men's Garters; Nuns; Slide Rules; Tonsillectomies and Typewriters and Wedding Night Virgins.

All of those topics are covered in the book and I have a copy if you want to borrow it.

Post Script: 

   If you are more interested in the subject of "Match Making," see my post - "Lonely in London."
Remember these?

A Few More Factlets

Wonder Woman - Factlet (10)

   If you are thinking about working out more (or even some) when the weather gets better, then this brief set of statistics may serve as an incentive. On the other hand, if you are breathing heavily after walking from the couch to the fridge, you might get depressed when reading about this woman for whom a 100-mile run is just a jaunt. She is clearly both finely tuned and named.  The stats are from here: “Woman Ultrarunners Age Like Fine Wine: Camille Herron, 40, Has Set Another World Record,” Victor Mather, New York Times, Feb. 27, 2022. On your ready, get set, go:

She has set multiple world records in open-road races and on tracks, in distances from 50 miles to races that lasted 24 hours. In 2017, she shattered the 100-mile world record by over an hour, finishing in 12 hours 42 minutes 40 seconds…

On Feb. 19, she did it again, breaking her own world record, in 12:41:11, a pace of 7:37 per mile. She also beat all the men in the race, with the first male runner, Arlen Glick, coming in about 30 minutes behind her with a time of 13:10:25.

If you are not yet impressed, she mentions at the end of the article: “I also hold the world record for 24 hours. I ran 167 miles in a day.” (about 270km).

Southern Ontario Real Estate - Factlet (11)

    If the rundown bungalow on your street is being offered for sale under a number in the high six figures, then I suppose it is reasonable to assume that the land upon which it sits is also worth a lot. This is good news for farmers, but rather bad news for those of us who enjoy eating. The raising of rutabagas looks less glamorous when one realizes that the land can produce warehouses more quickly and the yield is far, far more profitable. As I said in my earlier rant, there will soon be nothing but tarmac from Tillsonburg to Tilbury and all of southern Ontario will soon look like Toronto the Carbuncle. Here is the factlet:

"The rush is widespread, involving tens of thousands of acres of land in regions outside the Greater Toronto Area, including the Golden Horseshoe and all the way to Windsor, he adds. “Two years ago, we were talking between $300,000 to $450,000 per acre across Southwestern Ontario. Now it’s $800,000 to $1.5-million per acre."
From: "Commercial Real Estate Sees Record-breaking Canada-wide Land Rush," Wallace Immen, Globe & Mail, March 1, 2022.

If you are concerned about the loss of good agricultural land, there is an election soon. Here is a good resource produced by Environmental Defence Canada. 

WOE CANADA - Factlet (12)

   Given the focus on Identity and Indigeneity this statistic made me wonder if there will be a Canadian identity in the future, or several thousand solitudes not just two.

There are more than 630 First Nation communities in Canada, which represent more than 50 Nations and 50 Indigenous languages.
From: First Nations. 

Post Script:

   For the fine distinction between FACTLETS and FACTOIDS, new readers should see my post about GEE-GEES. 

Factlet (6)

 

Extraordinary Times....         Desperate Times.....

That's Billions With a 'B'

   For review, a Factlet is true, whereas a Factoid is only widely believed to be true. I have not provided a Factlet for a while, so here are a bunch of them in one post. My last one was about the Opioid Epidemic and was negative, and this one is about the Covid Pandemic, but is positive. The pandemic has been profitable for some and not just the manufacturers of Purell or the makers of plexiglass. To wit:

   To put the chart in context, consider this:

A Wealth Tax??

   Jeff Bezos has already decided to give $10 billion to causes relating to climate change. He started by donating $791 million to various organizations, including $100 million each to: The Environmental Defense Fund, The National Resources Defense Council. The Nature Conservancy, The World Resources Institute and The World Wildlife Fund.  This will certainly help, since in 2019 only 2% of the $730 billion given globally was for the fight against climate change.

   Elon Musk has decided to move from California to Texas. The decision may be related to the fact that the Lone Star State has less regulations and lower taxes.

   Short of pleading for these individuals to be more philanthropic, what could be done? Instituting a wealth tax is one option and it is being considered in the UK. It is suggested that the tax could be a one-time one and there appears to be a fair amount of public support for it. That would likely be true here, but perhaps not in the Lone Star State during the time of Trump.

Sources:

   The chart is from a report produced for Americans For Tax Fairness and The Institute for Policy Studies. The title: "Net Worth of U.S. Billionaires Has Soared by $1 Trillion - To Total of $4 Trillion - Since Pandemic Began." A sub-heading indicates that the "Wealth Increase in 9 Months Exceeds Likely $908 Billion Cost of Covid Relief Package GOP Has Stalled as Too Costly."

   The charitable actions of Bezos are reported in the Washington Post - see: "Bezos Makes First Donations From $10 Billion Earth Fund For Fighting Climate Change," Steven Mufson, Nov. 16, 2020.

Bezos owns the Washington Post.

   The title of the Wealth Tax Report is: "A Wealth Tax For the UK", Wealth Tax Commission Final Report, by Arun Advani et al. The full 126 pp final report is available. 

The defining feature of a one-off wealth tax is that it would be a one-off exceptional response to a particular crisis. Individuals would only be taxed once based on the wealth they owned valued at a particular date. They would still be allowed to pay the tax in instalments over a number of subsequent years, to reduce the cost in any single year, but the amount of tax would be based on their wealth on the initial assessment date.

For two articles about the report: "Economic Cost of Covid Crisis Prompts Call For One-Off UK Wealth Tax," Richard Partington, The Guardian, Dec. 9, 2020 and "U.K. Urged To Levy $350 Billion Wealth Tax to Fund Pandemic," Andrew Atkinson, Dec. 9, 2020.

The Bonus: 

   You will have noticed the names of three Waltons in the chart. To see what Alice did with a bit of her money a few years ago, read this earlier post or, when the pandemic is over, travel to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Factlet (3)

   You are probably relaxing and when you finally get around to Christmas shopping you will likely do so online. Who wants to face the bad weather, bad traffic and the other bad-mannered shoppers at some god-awful mall where there is also bad music playing. It is my duty, however, to spoil your day by providing this internet shopping alert which I noticed in a recent headline and which is presented as Factlet (3): "90,000 Packages Disappear Daily in N.Y.C."
   Package theft is also up in other American cities and one assumes that is the case even here. The article offers some remedies. In one apartment building a retired person who is always around accepts all the packages and apparently corporate mailrooms are packed because shoppers are sending the items ordered to their workplaces. Of course, one can shop (at the store, of course) for a camera like the one pictured above.

Sources: "90,000 Packages Disappear Daily in N.Y.C. Is Help on the Way?", Winnie Hu and Matthew Haag, New York Times, Dec. 2, 2019.
"In New York City, where more orders are delivered than anywhere else in the country, over 90,000 packages a day are stolen or disappear without explanation, up roughly 20 percent from four years ago, according to an analysis conducted for The New York Times.
About 15 percent of all deliveries in urban areas fail to reach customers on the first attempt because of package theft and other issues, like deliveries to the wrong house, according to transportation experts."
"Concerns about package theft have helped push video doorbell camera sales to about 1.2 million cameras nationally this year from less than 100,000 cameras sold in 2014, according to Jack Narcotta, a senior analyst for Strategy Analytics."

Post Script:
While I may have spoiled your day, I have provided a solution if you are wondering what to buy. A surveillance camera is a good option although the recipient may not get overly excited.

If you have forgotten what a Factlet is I will provide here the explanation offered when I told you what a Bee Gee was:
What's a Factlet?
     Almost daily I come across very interesting facts of which you are unaware and I thought it would be good for you and great for me if I just posted such information to avoid having to think and actually create content myself. This was going to be the first sample of what I was going to call a 'Factoid' which I thought was just a trivial bit of interesting information. But, I made the mistake of looking up the word which was coined by Norman Mailer back in the early '70s. Originally a 'factoid' was not something that was true, but rather information that was accepted as fact because it had been repeated or appeared in print. Given that there is so much 'fake news' around I thought it best to use the word suggested by William Safire so that you can be sure that the future factlets on this blog will be true trivia.
(For the source for this just see the Wiki entry for 'Factoid'.)

Factlet (2)

Brits and Their Pets

This morning I had breakfast at the local pub with a bunch of hockey playing friends, most of whom had just come from a game. I just participated in the dining part. Such participation, however, allows me to tell stories later in the day which often begin with a sentence like this - “One of my hockey buddies…” etc. - from which the listener forms the impression that I also am a hockey playing guy. Apart from good company and good stories, I benefit because vicarious exercise is much less strenuous than the real kind and, unless I choke on my toast, I am likely to be able to continue eating with them for the rest of the playing season. 

   One of the real hockey guys, who is more cerebral and sensitive than the others, contends that he reads this blog and wondered why I was not producing more content. I couldn’t say that it was because I play a lot of hockey. 

   He is surely lying about his reading habits, just as I may have exaggerated a bit about his sensitivity and cerebrality. If he does, in fact, take a peek occasionally at this blog, that means it is read by one person and he should be rewarded. Hence this quick post which can serve also as a test since I am inviting him to respond to it. Apart from an entertaining post he will also receive a shot of single malt for his solitary efforts. Now, about those Brits.

The Factlet

 Here finally is the Factlet you are waiting for. We all know that members of that island race love their pets and it has been recently reported that that love may be greater than the affection they feel for their partners. The reader of this blog knows that it has a contrarian strain which will again be exhibited in the Factlet chosen. It is reported that in 1939:

“At least 400,000 cats and dogs (around 26% of London’s cat and dog population) were euthanized in London in the first week of the war. This mass euthanasia was not legally required or even recommended by the British government, was opposed by veterinarians and animal charities (who nonetheless carried out many of the killings) and occurred during the period of the “phoney war”, long before bombs began to fall over London.”

My lone hockey guy reader can contact me to find out if, why and how such an episode happened. Any others who may stumble upon this will have to consult the sources provided.

Sources:

The Factlet is from: The Great Cat and Dog Massacre: The Real Story of World War Two’s Unknown Tragedy by Hilda Kean. Although it is published by a university press, a copy of it is not yet found in this university town, but you can validate it by looking at the website of the University of Chicago Press. You can also read a review of it: "Pet Cemetary: Why Londoners Killed Their Animals in the War," Clare Palmer, TLS, Sept. 22, 2017. The recent study about pet affection and the British can be found in many places, among them: “Study Finds 15% of Brits Love Their Pet More Than Their Partner, The Daily Star, Feb. 22, 2019. Some of you are probably thinking that you have read all of this before, but you are thinking of, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, Robert Darnton. That happened in Paris in the 1730s. Post Script: Mass panic was one reason behind the 1939 episode. Another has been reported about an individual who killed his pets out of fear for their future. Your bonus Factlet: "It is said that John Barrymore, the great American stage actor, being persuaded that the Martians had landed in upper state New York, took his two beloved Irish wolfhounds into his garden and, so that they might not fall prey to the alien invaders, shot them. Whether Orson Welles, whose notorious fake news adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds Barrymore had fallen for, ever apologised is unrecorded." "A Vast Cull of Pets was Organised on the Home Front in 1939 — To Pre-empt Them Being Blown to Pieces by the Germans," Wynn Wheldon, The Spectator, May 13, 2017. Now that source is not from a university press, so I went looking for substantiation - an important thing in this era of ‘fake news’. I did not find any, but I did find this, which may mean that there is an element of truth to in the account: “Rushing out to the kennel in which he kept his twenty St. Bernards, he [Barrymore] flung open the gate and released the dogs crying, “Fend For Yourselves.” Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes, p.44, note 7.

A FACTLET is better than a FACTOID. For more about this important distinction see the footnote in my post about GEE-GEES.

  

Factlet (1)

What's A GEE-GEE?

    A while back I posted about HEADLINES and provided examples of some that were funny, perplexing, incorrect, etc., so perhaps that is the reason I paused at this one: "Mustangs Brace for Balanced Attack From Gee-Gees." Here in Ontario it is not too difficult to figure out what it means, but those living elsewhere may be puzzled and I realized that I had no idea what a "Gee-Gee" is, other than it is attached to the teams playing for the University of Ottawa.

     Since you probably know and since the answer is easy to find I will say simply that it is an abbreviated way to refer to the school colours which are Garnet and Grey and fortunately the GG works in French, Grenat et Gris. 

     The professional football team in Ottawa is the REDBLACKS.  It is not uncommon, although it is rather unimaginative, for teams to be referred to by their colours. One finds, for example, the ALL BLACKS way down and under in New Zealand.  Choosing a colour for a name, one would think, allows the team to focus on the competition and avoid the controversy that has come to be associated with many team names which are now deemed to be unacceptable and inappropriate.

     Unfortunately, however, it is not that simple. Quite a while back a university team in an adjacent province chose the nickname of "Redmen" because of the red jerseys they wore. Perhaps they were somewhat shortsighted in not anticipating that the women on campus might someday form a team or perhaps they thought McGill Redwomen would work. 

     The choice of 'red" is now problematic. I understand that soon the students at McGill will have a vote to determine if the name needs to be changed. I am not sure if anyone has had the nerve to challenge the ALL BLACKS  for appropriating the colour or the haka.

Sources:
"Mustangs Brace for Balanced Attack From the Gee-Gees," Paul Vanderhoeven, London Free Press, Oct. 12, 2018.
"Indigenous Student Athlete Pushes McGill to Axe 'Redmen' Nickname," CTV News, Oct. 17, 2018.

Post Script:
     On the other side of the country, Simon Fraser University got into trouble even though the sports teams there are not named after a colour.  They are dubbed 'The Clan' (formerly 'The Clansmen').
     Although old Simon was born in Vermont his heritage was Scottish, hence the name. Now you are probably assuming that the team name is no longer acceptable because the chanting of it at games would traumatize some students who would be reminded of our horrible colonial past. But, it is more complicated than that and grammatical issues are involved as well as historical ones. When you name your team, be cautious about the colour choice and be aware of HOMOPHONES.
    SFU is involved in a bigger league, the NCAA, and there is concern that when the team travels to the south, the chant of "GO CLAN" might not sound right. I will conclude here with a source that explains it all. I have not checked to see what has happened.
"SFU Prof Says ‘Clan’ Team Name Should Change, Puts Student Athletes at Risk, Jon Azpiri, GlobalNews Sept. 24, 2017
"Holly Andersen, a professor with SFU’s department of philosophy, said the team name could offend some Americans who may associate The Clan with the Ku Klux Klan....
In a statement to Global News, Andersen said the team name “makes our competitors incredibly uncomfortable and puts them in a very awkward position.”

Apparently a student suggested that perhaps the teams should be called 'The Clams' to avoid embarrassment. Probably not. My suggestion - 'The Mussels' - would be better.

Bonus: 'Gee Gee' also refers to the first horse out of the starting gate. In this case, however, a Mustang won.

What's a Factlet?
     Almost daily I come across very interesting facts of which you are unaware and I thought it would be good for you and great for me if I just posted such information to avoid having to think and actually create content myself. This was going to be the first sample of what I was going to call a 'Factoid' which I thought was just a trivial bit of interesting information. But, I made the mistake of looking up the word which was coined by Norman Mailer back in the early '70s. Originally a 'factoid' was not something that was true, but rather information that was accepted as fact because it had been repeated or appeared in print. Given that there is so much 'fake news' around I thought it best to use the word suggested by William Safire so that you can be sure that the future factlets on this blog will be true trivia.
(For the source for this just see the Wiki entry for 'Factoid'.)