Slate, UNESCO

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RIP
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Re: Slate, UNESCO

Post by RIP »

Bearbonesnorm wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:16 am
*) I think the Principality of Wales only existed in the late Middle Ages? (**) Apparently you guys are a fully-fledged country in its own right these days :wink:
Although an independent nation, Wales never really had a King. Instead there were lots of Princes who each controlled their own areas. This division and in-fighting made it much easier for the English (who were really French), to invade / take over. On the few occasions that the Welsh did pull together, they were able to achieve victories against the odds, albeit aided by the terrain and 'gorilla' tactics.
Cheers Stu. Mmm, I'd always thought we'd just had Kings of the Britons (*). But just had a little read around and apparently Wales did once have a king! Gruffudd ap Llywelyn. Unfortunately he only lasted six years from 1057 - 1063. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Wales .

I'm getting really into this now! Mrs Perrin has told me to get on with the hoovering but that can wait.

(*) Do forgive me for quoting this scene in its entirety but it is a classic, one of my favourites.... Jonesy/Palin/Chapman at their finest... just about every line, no, every word, is beautifully crafted and carefully chosen...

"ARTHUR: How do you do, good lady? I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Who's castle is that?

WOMAN: King of the who?

ARTHUR: The Britons.

WOMAN: Who are the Britons?

ARTHUR: Well, we all are. We are all Britons, and I am your king.

WOMAN: I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.

DENNIS: You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship: a self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--

WOMAN: Oh, there you go bringing class into it again.

DENNIS: That's what it's all about. If only people would hear of--

ARTHUR: Please! Please, good people. I am in haste. Who lives in that castle?

WOMAN: No one lives there.

ARTHUR: Then who is your lord?

WOMAN: We don't have a lord.

ARTHUR: What?

DENNIS: I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week,...

ARTHUR: Yes.

DENNIS: ...but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting...

ARTHUR: Yes, I see.

DENNIS: ...by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,...

ARTHUR: Be quiet!

DENNIS: ...but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major--

ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!

WOMAN: Order, eh? Who does he think he is? Heh.

ARTHUR: I am your king!

WOMAN: Well, I didn't vote for you.

ARTHUR: You don't vote for kings.

WOMAN: Well, how did you become King, then?

ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake,...

[angels sing]

...her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur.

[singing stops]

That is why I am your king!

DENNIS: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

ARTHUR: Be quiet!

DENNIS: Well, but you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

ARTHUR: Shut up!

DENNIS: I mean, if I went 'round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!

ARTHUR: Shut up, will you? Shut up!

DENNIS: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.

ARTHUR: Shut up!

DENNIS: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

ARTHUR: Bloody peasant!

DENNIS: Oh, what a give-away. Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That's what I'm on about. Did you see him repressing me? You saw it, didn't you?"
Last edited by RIP on Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:45 am, edited 2 times in total.
"My God, Ponsonby, I'm two-thirds of the way to the grave and what have I done?" - RIP

The sign outside the asylum is the wrong way round.....

"At least you got some stories" - James Acaster
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Re: Slate, UNESCO

Post by RIP »

sean_iow wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:21 am
RIP wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:06 am I believe the light, sorry beacon, itself doesn't rotate, only the reflector/obscurer around it.
That way the electrical connections for the bulb don't have to rotate or have slip rings. Isn't it the same for lighthouses? Only the lens bit rotates and the bulb remains stationary?
I was going to digress into lighthouses too but you've beaten me to it Sean :-bd
"My God, Ponsonby, I'm two-thirds of the way to the grave and what have I done?" - RIP

The sign outside the asylum is the wrong way round.....

"At least you got some stories" - James Acaster
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Re: Slate, UNESCO

Post by Bearbonesnorm »

Cheers Stu. Mmm, I'd always thought we'd just had Kings of the Britons (*). But just had a little read around and apparently Wales did once have a king! Gruffudd ap Llywelyn. Unfortunately he only lasted six years from 1057 - 1063.
I don't dispute the fact that there was the odd 'King of all' but they tended to be the exception and seemed to struggle to control the in-fighting for very long. I put that down to the tribal nature of the Britons who are of course Welsh by that point. :wink:

PS. I'm loving how far we've come in just two pages :-bd
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Re: Slate, UNESCO

Post by RIP »

Bearbonesnorm wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:38 am
Cheers Stu. Mmm, I'd always thought we'd just had Kings of the Britons (*). But just had a little read around and apparently Wales did once have a king! Gruffudd ap Llywelyn. Unfortunately he only lasted six years from 1057 - 1063.
I don't dispute the fact that there was the odd 'King of all' but they tended to be the exception and seemed to struggle to control the in-fighting for very long. I put that down to the tribal nature of the Britons who are of course Welsh by that point. :wink:

PS. I'm loving how far we've come in just two pages :-bd
Yes this is one of our better digressive efforts...

Now about those lighthouses.....
"My God, Ponsonby, I'm two-thirds of the way to the grave and what have I done?" - RIP

The sign outside the asylum is the wrong way round.....

"At least you got some stories" - James Acaster
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Re: Slate, UNESCO

Post by Cheeky Monkey »

I met the contractor recently who removed the "mercury pool" from the Rock of Gibraltar's lighthouse.

Knowing Gib' I suspect they scooped it up with their hands into a bucket :roll:

Moreover, having read this:
Mad as a Lighthouse Keeper — Not the Solitude, but the Mercury
Posted on March 20, 2014 by Rick Spilman

We recently posted about three killer lighthouses. It turns out that lighthouse keepers had more to worry about than simply storms and terrible conditions. In the 19th century, lighthouse keepers had a high frequency of madness and suicide. Many assumed that they went mad from solitude and the demands of the job. It turns out it was something simpler and more sinister.

Fresnel lenses were the great lighthouse innovation of the 19th century. The lenses developed by French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel greatly increased the intensity and range of the lighthouse beacon. For rotating lights, just as importance as the strength of the light, however, was maintaining a specific speed of rotation, so that if the chart said that the light flashed every twenty seconds, the light, in fact, rotated so that the light was visible every twenty seconds. The best near zero-friction bearing of the day was created by floating the light and the lens on a circular track of liquid mercury. When dust, dirt or other impurities built up in the mercury, part of the light house keeper’s job was to strain the mercury through a fine cloth.

Though not understood at the time, mercury is a deadly poison. One of the symptoms of mercury poisoning can be the onset of madness. Those involved in the manufacture of hats in the 18th and 19th centuries also suffered from mercury poisoning, becoming as “mad as a hatter” as the old saying went. Like the hatters of their day, the light house keepers were being driven mad by exposure to mercury fumes. The solitude was not driving the lighthouse keepers mad. They were being poisoned by the lighthouse itself. Perhaps we should add “mad as a lighthouse keeper” to the lexicon.
http://www.oldsaltblog.com/2014/03/mad- ... e-mercury/

You weren't a lighthouse keeper were you Reg?
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Re: Slate, UNESCO

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You weren't a lighthouse keeper were you Reg?
:grin:
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Re: Slate, UNESCO

Post by RIP »

Bearbonesnorm wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 10:11 am
You weren't a lighthouse keeper were you Reg?
:grin:
wibble
"My God, Ponsonby, I'm two-thirds of the way to the grave and what have I done?" - RIP

The sign outside the asylum is the wrong way round.....

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Re: Slate, UNESCO

Post by sean_iow »

This is the story that I always think about when lighthouses are mentioned

Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy

The old lighthouse brought about a change in lighthouse policy in 1801 after a gruesome episode, sometimes called the Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy. Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffith, the two-person team that managed the lighthouse, were publicly known to quarrel. When Griffith died in a freak accident, Howell feared that if he discarded the body into the sea, authorities might accuse him of murder. As Griffith's body began to decompose, Howell built a makeshift coffin for the corpse and lashed it to an outside shelf. Stiff winds blew the box apart, and the body's arm fell within view of the hut's window. As the winds would blow, gusts would catch the arm and move it in a way that made the appendage appear to beckon. In spite of his former partner's decaying corpse and working the lighthouse alone, Howell was able to keep the house's lamp lit. When Howell was finally relieved of duty, the impact of the situation was so emotionally taxing that his friends did not recognize him. As a result, the governing body changed the lighthouse policy to make lighthouse teams rosters of three people, which continued until the automation of British lighthouses in the 1980s


Just about every year at Christmas the RNLI used to have to deliver the turkey and presents to the Needles Lighthouse as the seas would be too bad for the delivery boat. They could have planned further ahead of course and delivered the supplies earlier, perhaps they didn't know when Christmas was :roll:
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Re: Slate, UNESCO

Post by BigdummySteve »

I recently did an inspection on a ship which had been turned into a gig venue, Thekla which is moored in Bristol mud dock (good bike shop/ cafe opposite if you need to waste overtime) anyhow I looked over the water a there was an old friend. It was one of the original Goodwin sands lightships, for most of my young years it was just there, blinking away, then at 17 I got a job on a fishing boat. We’re not talking a factory ship here, skipper and me, launch down a steep pebble beach on greased logs then winch it back up! Hard work but I once earned more than my father’s monthly wage in three days (lots of bass).
When we were out at night in bad weather the north and south lightships somehow seemed to offer some hope of salvation if things went south, after some time I got to recognise the angles between there lights and other navigation clues such as the B1 buoy and seaside towns. I’m hopeless at trigonometry but somehow the angles allowed me to work out our position. Hard to understand just how reassuring there constant presence is unless you’ve relied on them.
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Re: Slate, UNESCO

Post by RIP »

BigdummySteve wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 7:39 pm gig venue, Thekla
First purchased and run by Viv Stanshall and his missus of course. Find any long-lost souvenirs backstage? Any pink half-painted drainpipes for example?
"My God, Ponsonby, I'm two-thirds of the way to the grave and what have I done?" - RIP

The sign outside the asylum is the wrong way round.....

"At least you got some stories" - James Acaster
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Re: Slate, UNESCO

Post by BigdummySteve »

RIP wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 7:48 pm
BigdummySteve wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 7:39 pm gig venue, Thekla
First purchased and run by Viv Stanshall and his missus of course. Find any long-lost souvenirs backstage? Any pink half-painted drainpipes for example?
Probably if you looked in the right place, definitely run by some interesting people. The ‘office’ and accommodation definitely had a very hippie vibe.
As a venue apparently it’s a nightmare, as someone who’s played bass live I appreciate that the rooms acoustics change once you fill it with people (more bass needed obviously :-bd ) but apparently the major issue was the water line, apart from the condensation wreaking havoc with the rigging the room, once filled with punters was actually below water level and sounded very different.
As an interesting aside I did the job after seeing massive attack at filton airfield, turned out that the sound tech was also the Bass player at that gig, After congratulating him on a stellar performance I obviously inquired about the massive attack/Banksy connection. All I can say is that it’s not Robert :wink:
We’re all individuals, except me.

I woke up this morning but I’m still in the dark
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