Funny Friday

Earlier this year I posted some quotes and snippets on cheeses.  You can read that by clicking on:

http://bytesdaily.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/some-thoughts-on-cheese.html

The topic of cheese cane up at trivia again the other day when I mentioned the old saying "Oh, What a Friend We Have in Cheeses!"

That sparked the idea of today's theme for Funny Friday . . .

Corn Corner:

What kind of cheese likes to greet itself in the mirror?

Halloumi

Some spotty youth threw a block of mild cheese through our lounge window today.   I went outside and shouted after him "Well that's not very mature!"

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Limerick Spot:

It needn't have ribaldry's taint
Or strive to make everyone faint.
There's a type that's demure
And perfectly pure
Though it helps quite a lot if it ain't.

There once was a pretty young Mrs.
Whose tearful but short story thrs.
Her mind lost its grasp -
Now she thinks she's an asp
And just sits in the corner and hrs.

Some More Funny Street Art: Mobstr

“I am just having some fun but I hope it has a hint of underlying truth. I don’t take what I do too seriously but don’t be mistaken there is a massive passion behind it.” 

- Mobstr

The work of Mobstr, an anonymous street artist from Newcastle, England, ranges from whimsical to thought provoking and even intellectual. Unlike other street artists, he often uses just words, in ordinary fonts and without embellishments, thereby focusing attention on the message. Sometimes he even incorporates the cleaners who overpaint his art as part of the ongoing story. 

Some examples of the latter:

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More Mobstr in future Bytes.

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The Third World

Caution: the following items uses swear words.

Yesterday’s post looked at First World problems.

The term Third World is commonly used in various situations and contexts but exactly what is it, how did it come about? 

According to Wikipedia: “Due to the complex history of evolving meanings and contexts, there is no clear or agreed upon definition of the Third World.”

Here are some definitions and explanations from The Urban Dictionary:

Derived from a time when the communist states were referred to as the second world, the third world is the less economically developed countries that hugely rely on richer countries

The Third World is all poor because of the richer countries.

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Profanity mumbled to oneself when dealing with any form of inefficiency, deception, incompetence, malfunction, disillusion, ignorance, shortage, exasperation or failure.

The inspectors knew the bridge would collapse but they did nothing. Third world.

I've been waiting in line for 6 hours to get in. Fucking third world.

You only have a dial-up connection? Are you third world fucking kidding?

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A name that is used for a friend that is from a country that is not up to standards of the western world.

buddy u have no running water? what are u, third world?

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Not being cleaned-up to interact with others. This could include recently taken a dump, not being showered, not having brushed teeth, &/or dirty home

I'd love to have you over now, but I'm too third world. 

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Any country that owes rolls of money to the IMF and the World Bank.

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A term that refers to any “country” that exhibits several (if not all) of the following: 

Sandy, hot, full of hate, few (if any) exploitable natural resources, massive election fraud, genocides, outbreaks of diseases you thought were eliminated through massive vaccination projects of the 1950's, and a general complete lack of any semblance of an infrastructure, dictatorships, Peoples Democratic Republic of (insert name here) 

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The term Third World was coined by French demographer, anthropologist and historian Alred Sauvy in a 1952 article when he referred to countries that were neither aligned with the capitalist NATO bloc (The First World: North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia.) or the Communist Soviet Bloc (The Second World: Russia, Eastern Europe e.g., Poland and some of the Turk States e.g., Kazakhstan, as well as China). Sauvy’s “Third World” term was a reference to the Third Estate of France prior to and during the French Revolution where the First Estate was constituted by the clergy, the Second Estate by the nobles and the Third Estate comprised the commoners. Sauvy wrote, "This third world ignored, exploited, despised like the third estate also wants to be something."

The above classification of countries and a Three World Model as typified by the map at the beginning of this post is today considered outmoded.

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From the Encyclopaedia of World Geography:

What makes a nation third world? 

Despite ever evolving definitions, the concept of the third world serves to identify countries that suffer from high infant mortality, low economic development, high levels of poverty, low utilization of natural resources, and heavy dependence on industrialized nations. These are the developing and technologically less advanced nations of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America. Third world nations tend to have economies dependent on the developed countries and are generally characterized as poor with unstable governments and having high rates of population growth, illiteracy, and disease. A key factor is the lack of a middle class — with impoverished millions in a vast lower economic class and a very small elite upper class controlling the country's wealth and resources. Most third world nations also have a very large foreign debt.

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By the way: although attempts were made to classify as “Fourth World” those countries even more distressed than Third World, that concept never proved popular. The term Fourth World has come to be applied to populations, cultural entities and ethnic groups whose size and shape does not map onto citizenship in a specific nation-state. It therefore applies to Basques, Kurds, Romani, even Australian aborigines.

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First World Problems

Problems from living in a wealthy, industrialized nation that third worlders would probably roll their eyes at.

    - Urban Dictionary

First World problem is a slang term used to refer to issues in First World nations that are complained about only because of the absence of more pressing concerns. The term was added to the Oxford Dictionary Online in November 2012. 

The term "First World problem" arose in 1995 but gained recognition as an internet meme beginning in 2005, particularly on social networking sites like Twitter (where it became a popular hashtag). The term is used to minimize complaints about trivial issues by shaming the complainer. UNICEF NZ conducted a survey of First World problems in New Zealand, finding slow web access to be the most common. 

    - Wikipedia

More Then and Now

A little while back I posted pics of then and now images by Sergey Larenkov. He had taken photographs of World War 2 destruction, fighting and troop and equipment movements, then located the same sites today and superimposed the images over each other. 

 Here is an example of such a composition which may be one of his or not. Ihave not been able to find the name of the person responsible.

The image offers a stark contrast between then and now, as well as insights on constancy, change and time . . .

Since then I have become aware of the work of other photographers who are doing the same type of thing with both WW2 and other historical events and places:

Jo Teeuwisse:

Historical expert Jo Teeuwisse, from Amsterdam, found 300 old negatives of WW2 images at a flea market near her home. She searched out the locations and took modern day photos, likewise superimposing the images. According to her, 'I knew what happened there, but knowing the exact spot of some detail will etch it into your visual memory.” It led to her doing the same with photographs in France and across Europe.

Some of her work:

Original 1944 photograph, Avenue de Paris in Cherbourg 

The scene today

The combined image

The touches of colour show today’s stairs, the black and white shows the grim scene on those stairs in 1944 on Rue Armand Levéel in the French city of Cherbourg

German prisoners of war being walked through Cherbourg

German soldiers surrendering beside the modern terraced houses of the Rue des Fossés Plissons in Domfront, Orne

Village behind the front lines in Normandy celebrate Bastille Day for the first time in over four years at a memorial that still stands today

Seth Taras:

Seth Taras has done the same with images for the History Channel for its “Know Where You Stand” campaign:

Soldiers storm the Normandy beaches as modern tourists look for crabs (June 6, 1944/2004).

Adolf Hitler poses victoriously next to a couple in Paris (1940/2004).

The Berlin Wall and two soldiers float behind a man talking on his mobile phone (1989/2004).

The LZ 129 Hindenburg airship crashes behind a dog walker in Lakehurst, New Jersey (May 6, 1937/2004).

(More Then and Now images in coming weeks).

Readers Write

Some emails received from Byters . . . (thanks people)

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Kerrie and the Great White Fleet:

Hi Otto, 

Following on from your bytes about the 1908 visit to Sydney of the Great White Fleet I realised their were 4 streets in Five Dock that took their names from some of the ships in this fleet. They are Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota and New Jersey. Connecticut and Illinois run off Ramsay Road. Minnesota and New Jersey run off Henley Marine Drive into Connecticut. I remember reading about the origins of the names when my kids were doing a school history project.

Kind regards

Kerrie 

Comment:

For those readers not familiar with Five Dock, it is a suburb located about 7 kilometres west of the Sydney CBD. The name Five Dock dates back to the days when Sydney was first settled in 1788 and refers to 5 water worn indentations in the bay on the Parramatta River in that particular area. It resulted in the name Five Docks and Five Dock being applied to that location, with the latter eventually becoming the preferred version. The name is believed to have been in use as early as 1797. In 1806 Governor King granted land in that area to Surgeon John Harris, who ended up with a farm he called Five Dock Farm. It included the areas of the present day suburbs of Five Dock, Wareemba, Russell Lea, Rodd Point, Abbotsford, Chiswick and Drummoyne. Agitation by some local residents for a change of name resulted in a local referendum in 1922. The locals voted to keep the name and it has so remained ever since. As Kerrie points out, some of the street names are named after Great White Fleet ships that visited Sydney in 1908.

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Kara and the Lusitania:

Forgive me Otto but am I the only one skeptical about the Lusitania note? If the note ends abruptly, which in the circumstances of it being written, implies the worst, how then did it end up in a bottle?  

The expression on the face of the Auschwitz survivor, speaks volumes. That particular message must have stirred some truly haunting memories that no doubt were never far from the surface.

Kara

Comment:

I was also dubious in that I was unable to locate the name of the writer, the finder or the date. Apparently there are different versions of this story: the letter’s content varies and was either picked up by a fisherman at sea, or found on a beach. Although the unfinished ending can be put down to the lack of time to finish, let’s put this one into "Dubious Until Confirmed” category.

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Nadia and arrows:

Dear Otto,

Thought you might find this interesting. I did! Knowing you, you probably know about the arrows already...but just in case. Checked it out on Snopes and it is true! 

Thanks for all your Bytes.  

Cheers, 

Nadia

This is what Nadia sent:

Giant Concrete Arrows…

These Really Exist: Giant Concrete Arrows That Point Your Way Across America…

Every so often, usually in the vast deserts of the American Southwest, a hiker or a backpacker will run across something puzzling: a large concrete arrow, as much as seventy feet in length, sitting in the middle of scrub-covered nowhere.

What are these giant arrows? Some kind of surveying mark? Landing beacons for flying saucers? Earth’s turn signals?

No it’s . . .The Transcontinental Air Mail Route.

On August 20, 1920, the United States opened its first coast-to-coast airmail delivery route, just 60 years after the Pony Express closed up shop. There were no good aviation charts in those days, so pilots had to eyeball their way across the country using landmarks. This meant that flying in bad weather was difficult, and night flying was just about impossible.

The Postal Service solved the problem with the world’s first ground-based civilian navigation system: a series of lit beacons that would extend from New York to San Francisco. Every ten miles, pilots would pass a bright yellow concrete arrow. Each arrow would be surmounted by a 51-foot steel tower and lit by a million-candlepower rotating beacon.

(A generator shed at the tail of each arrow powered the beacon.)

Now mail could get from the Atlantic to the Pacific not in a matter of weeks, but in just 30 hours or so. 

Even the dumbest of air mail pilots, it seems, could follow a series of bright yellow arrows straight out of a Tex Avery cartoon. 

By 1924, just a year after Congress funded it, the line of giant concrete markers stretched from Rock Springs, Wyoming to Cleveland, Ohio. The next summer, it reached all the way to New York, and by 1929 it spanned the continent uninterrupted, the envy of postal systems worldwide.

Radio and radar are, of course, infinitely less cool than a concrete Yellow Brick Road from sea to shining sea, but I think we all know how this story ends. New advances in communication and navigation technology made the big arrows obsolete, and the Commerce Department decommissioned the beacons in the 1940s. The steel towers were torn down and went to the war effort.

But the hundreds of arrows remain. Their yellow paint is gone, their concrete cracks a little more with every winter frost, and no one crosses their path much, except for coyotes and tumbleweeds.

But they’re still out there.

Comment:

I am indebted to Nadia for bringing this to my attention. I had not seen or heard of it before and it is fascinating.

Some more information and items about the Transcontinental Airmail Route

• The lit beacons were bright enough that a pilot could see the next one from the one he was at. The arrows were for daylight and inclement weather. 

• Some states destroyed the arrows during WW2 so as not to assist German planes in the event of invasion. 

• The following site gives a lot of good pics, as well as Google Earth map references for the arrows that can be viewed aerially: 

http://www.core77.com/blog/transportation/what_are_these_giant_concrete_arrows_across_the_american_landscape_25236.asp

• Ancient airmail route markers in Peru: