7 things I've learned this week

1. There are 99 rivers in the world which are four times longer than the Thames, most of which I'd never heard of.
2. Liberace won record damages when he sued the Daily Mirror for libel after it said he was gay. Until learning this, I'd never understood the appeal of Blair or Cameron.
3. Median hourly pay is higher in lorry manufacturing than in financial services.
4. 50 years ago, most Italians didn't speak Italian.
5. Romans didn't often wear togas, and plebeians were sometimes rich.
6. Ned Ludd, possibly fictional founder of the Luddites, came from Anstey, just down the road from me.
7. The chupacabra might be real. More likely, there are even more breeds of ugly dog than I'd realised.

Comments

[Tim Worstall]

"Until learning this, I'd never understood the appeal of Blair or Cameron."

Hunh?

[Matthew]

Perhaps Chris means that lies are believed if they are audacious enough?

[chris]

Quite - some people will believe absolutely anything.

[Bob B]

"Liberace won record damages when he sued the Daily Mirror for libel"

I remember that. It was in a piece by Cassandra, the nom de plume of William Connor, a widely read columnist in the Mirror from July 1935 through February 1967:
http://lorry.org/cassandra/

It wasn't that he made a bald, straight claim about Liberace being gay. He went on about it, at length, in a column of fluorescent homophobia which certainly skidded past the legal benchmark of published writing likely to engender hatred, ridicule or contempt. I think that many of Liberace's many female admirers of a certain age had long appreciated that his sexual preferences rendered them all utterly safe from any instrusive attentions by him and they loved him for it because he pandered to them, and how.

[Bob B]

It occurs to me that those unfamiliar with an inimitable media performance by Liberace at the piano may be stressed nowadays to understand what all the excitement was about but fortunately or otherwise, as the case may be, Youtube is now at hand to preserve and illuminate the past:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HKr0WgVW4MA&NR=1

There are regretted moments when I think the word "oleaginous" must have been first devised to describe Librace and his passing was not uneventful, as this video clip indicates:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=q8WOoBmSc80

[jameshigham]

N4 is very important but I can't quite see the connection with managerialism, Chris.

[Geoffrey Roberts]

What I've learned:
Chris's use of English is inconsistent! He states he uses OED spellings, but has spelt signalling as signaling AND used realised rather than realized.

I think Chris needs an editor!

[technical writing jobs]

If you know we know, you can't do anything weird, anything that can make some harm