I am pleased to say that yesterday, Meg appeared to have had a solid night's sleep which is always a good way to face the day. For my own part, I decided to hunt out a pair of large oversize socks that I wear occasionally with boots and slept in those last night and I think I will repeat the practice of having a pair of night time bedsocks to wear which is useful in case my feet poke out from under the blankets. As I was on my way to bed I popped up through the TV channels and alighted upon the PBS channel which always broadcasts interesting material. There, I soon got absorbed into a fascinating program about the rise and the influence of the Klu Klux Klan in the USA. This has had several periods of resurgence and decline, even surviving though at one point it had been specifically legislated against. A few salient features stuck in my mind of which one was the KKK was actually founded by slave owners and in its heyday in the 1860's actually murdered by lynching 1000 black people in a four week period with no fear of any retribution. Hanging and shooting was a common modus operandi but with the coming of the motor car we got black people dragged along behind a car until they were dead and their bodies multi lated in a most disgusting fashion such as cutting off a man's penis and stuffing it his own mouth. The film also documented the making of an enormously influential film 'Birth of a Nation' made in 1915 (a shorter prequel to this film was called 'The Clansman', by the way) This film rewrote American history and glorified white power and deployed a whole sequence of really advanced cinematographic techniques for the time. It made a tremendous amount of money and was seen by, and influenced the lives, of millions of Americans, particularly in the Deep South. I learned that a Democratic American President. Woodrow Wilson, commissioned a special viewing of the film in the White House when he took office and approved of its themes heartily, giving them his full endorsement. The fortunes of the KKK have waxed and waned over the years - for example, its leaders were often prone to scandal (including at one point the rape and murder of a white mistress) and events such as WW2 in which black soldiers help to fight for and defend American values made the KKK lose some of its salience. But one of the most chilling facts that I learnt was that the KKK lost influence at the point when it had been massively successful. As soon as white power was entrenched in the voting arrangements, legislatures and court houses across the south, then there was no longer any need for the crude methods of the KKK when its aims had been successfully accomplished and legitimated. As well as being pathologically venomous towards all black peoples, the same strictures applied to Jews and to Catholics and to become a member of the KKK one had to prove one's white Protestant credentials. One way in which they made money was, in effect, a Ponzi scheme in which a recruit had to pay an annual fee to fund the lifestyles of the KKK leaders but received a reduction of 40% of their annual fee for each new recruit that they made. I am not sure if it is possible to view the whole of this program via YouTube because I would like Meg to share it with me in all of its fascinating horror.
Straight after breakfast, we were delighted to receive a telephone call from our University of Birmingham friend, arranging a rendez-vous for the three of us in Waitrose. On my way down the hill, I was engaged in a mental calculation and armed with this, I set our friend the following imaginary (bit it could have been real) problem. If you were in charge of commissioning a supply of blankets for the Russian Army and Navy, what length of blanket would you specify as the optimum length: too short and the military personnel would go cold but too long and the excess material (and therefore cost) when multiplied over millions of blankets would be considerable. We went through the following line of reasoning. Let us assume that the tallest Russian military person you would ever meet would be 6'8" in height (which just happens to 2 metres) Now you can deduct the blanket covering the head which could be estimated at about 25cm (or about a foot) but then you would have to add on the extra blanket necessary to ensure a good covering of the feet, say 20 cm extra. This gives you an 'excess over headless body length' of about 45cm which is about 17-18" which is just about the right amount to tuck under the feet. So the optimum length for a Russian military blanket is 2.20 meters. The reason for trying to understand the answer to this question lies in the fact that with a spell of cold weather approaching, I thought an extra blanket would be useful and purchased a woollen blanket which was new but ex-military stock as supplied to the Russian army and navy - and the length was 2.20 metres. Now somebody, somewhere no doubt went through all of the calculations detailed above and for the same purpose which was to ensure that the blankets were the right length for the vast majority of military personnel but not so excessively long that an excess cost would ensue.
Meg and I drifted into watching the most shmaltzy of films we saw this afternoon ('A Dog's Journey') which explored a series of human relationships through the eyes of a hound (and it various offspring in which its spirit migrated) This turned out to be quite enjoyable at the end with, of course, a happy ending but many twists and turns along the way. The dog was of course a model of faithfulness and consistency that could not be said of the various humans that impinged upon its life. There was another story called 'Buster' who was the dog belonging to Roy Hattersley and this too was an interesting tale of political dialogues and intrigues but told from the perspective of the dog rather than its human owner so as a literary device, this has been tried before. The film we saw this afternoon may well have been a sequel but I am sure it have appealed to some children and other of an excessive sentimental disposition.
© Mike Hart [2024]