The Breezer - the joyride for a curious mind: A weekly newsletter from me, Steve Winduss, at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me discovering historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week. Add to that updates relating to the podcast, a touch of humour and a dash of "lots more". - 17th November 2024.

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Happy Sunday!
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I hope you’ve had a great week. It’s been a little calmer after the intensity of the US elections, whether you were interested or not. In the UK, we would say that it feels like “after the Lord Mayor’s Show”.
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While ducking the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, I came across an interesting chap, perhaps not new to you, but one I wanted to share anyway. Elbridge Gerry. Here we go…
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Elbridge Gerry was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1744. He led a life worthy of historical reference, yet his name has limited recall in the United States. As far as the UK goes, I would bet that the occasional quiz whiz or taxi driver may recognise Elbridge’s name, but that would be about it.
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Gerry was an American Founding Father, signing the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He was one of three delegates who refused to sign the US Constitution in 1787 due to concerns over potential centralisation of power. His opposition dissipated once the Bill of Rights was passed in 1791.
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Elbridge was elected as Governor of Massachusetts in 1810 before being elevated to Vice President in 1812. Unfortunately for Gerry, having served under President James Madison for only 18 months, he died in office 210 years ago on Saturday, 23 November 1814.

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But for all Elbridge’s contribution to American independence and the early political development of the United States, he is primarily remembered as the chap who dared to tinker with electoral boundaries.
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One of Gerry’s first acts as Massachusetts' Governor was to support a plan to reconstruct district electoral boundaries to favour his party, the Democratic-Republicans*, over the Federalists. He was, however, a reluctant signatory, acting under pressure from the party.
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Soon after the redistricting plan was signed into law, Essex County district boundaries came under the spotlight. The manipulation was so outlandish it caused an uproar, particularly from the Federalist press. Gerry would be hung out to dry.
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In a cartoon by Elkanah Tisdale, the shape of the main reconstituted boundary was depicted as a rather aggressive dragon-styled creature, likened to that of a salamander, a small lizard.
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Elkanah’s cartoon inspired a new term for the practice, a hybrid of Elbridge’s last name and ‘salamander’... 'Gerry-mander'.

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Today, the term gerrymandering is in common use in the United States when describing a situation where electoral boundaries are manipulated for political gain.
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If you’re wondering how it is possible to rig an electoral outcome without physically moving voters around a county, take a look at the diagram below.
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Assume each blue square and red dot is a precinct, with 15 precincts forming a county. In the example, we have nine blue precincts and six red.
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Now let’s assume that we need to divide the county into three electoral districts, each with five precincts.

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If you take a look across all three, you can see that, without changing any reds or blues, the district boundaries can be adjusted to produce quite different results.
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In (a), the blues win 3-0. In (b), the blues win 2-1 and in (c), the reds win 2-1, even though they are outnumbered nine to six.
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So, rather than voters picking their politicians, the politicians are picking their voters.
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The terms ‘cracking’, packing’, kidnapping and ‘hijacking’ have become common terminology in US political circles, each referring to a specific technique for reshuffling the electoral pack.
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Modern technology has honed the practice down to a fine art. I can only imagine how Artificial Intelligence will take gerrymandering to another level.
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In the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the issue of electoral boundary tampering was largely eradicated with the introduction of independent boundary commissions.
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So, why doesn’t the United States do the same? Why don’t turkeys vote for Christmas?

Or to put it another way….
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There is an anecdote that circulates among cricket folk in the UK that goes something like this:
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During a Sunday afternoon village cricket game, the umpire gave a batsman out LBW. ‘Leg before wicket’ refers to an umpire’s subjective guess that the ball would have hit the stumps if the batsman’s pads weren’t in the way.
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The batsman, who happened to be a local journalist, wasn’t happy about the decision. He let the umpire know his feelings as he walked past and back to the pavilion.
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The umpire said sarcastically,
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The batsman replied,
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Or to put it yet another way…
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…as Winston Churchill once said… (or was it Hermann Göring?)…
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It seems that gerrymandering may be around for a while yet.

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*The Democratic-Republican party fragmented after 1824, with one segment becoming today's Democratic Party.

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By the Way

Five years ago today, 17 November 2019, a 55-year-old man walked through his local seafood wholesale market in Hubei Province, China.

A couple of weeks later, he felt unwell and was hospitalised. The hospital and the seafood market were in the city of Wuhan. The man would be one of the first, if not the first, to contract COVID-19.
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The root cause of the virus has not yet been universally accepted. Theory one suggests that the coronavirus was contracted from bats, possibly through the intermediary of pangolins, mink or cats. We became familiar with the term ‘zoonotic spillover”, where a virus jumps from an animal host to a human.

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Theory two highlights the existence of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research centre that studies coronaviruses.

The case for the centre was not helped by the limited access to labs and witnesses afforded to the World Health Organisation scientists during their visit in 2021. When a WHO request came in for a second visit, access was refused completely.

The World Health Organisation currently reports that COVID-19 is directly responsible for over seven million deaths. Estimates for excess mortality, i.e. the number of deaths in a period over and above what is statistically expected, reach as high as 14 million.

The difference between the two figures is accounted for primarily by the strain put on health services worldwide. Routine healthcare, such as screenings and vaccinations, was restricted, while patients with chronic and acute illnesses received a more limited standard of care than the norm.
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By comparison, the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 - inappropriately referred to as 'Spanish' flu - was responsible for between 50-100 million deaths. It is thought to have originated from the unsanitary Western Front camps in World War I, exacerbated by the return home of soldiers at the end of the war.

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Dates with History

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Today…..

The Age of Sail was that period of history when European nations reached into the four corners of the world by sea, from Christopher Columbus in the late 15th century through to the emergence of steamships early in the 19th century.
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The opening of the Suez Canal in Egypt, 155 years ago today, 17 November 1869, constituted one of the markers leading to the beginning of the end of the age.
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Ships had traditionally sailed from Europe to Asia via the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of the African continent.
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Once the Suez Canal was completed, ships could sail from the Mediterranean Sea, along the canal and out into the Red Sea. From there, the Red Sea linked directly into the Indian Ocean, cutting out Africa altogether. 9,000 km of travel were spared each way, together with associated savings in time and expense.

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The 193-kilometre-long Suez Canal had taken ten years to construct. One of its extraordinary features is that it has no locks; The Mediterranean and Red Seas are approximately at the same sea level, the terrain through which the canal was cut is flat and tidal effects are minimal at either end.
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The Suez Canal doesn’t need any locks.
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Sailing ships struggled to navigate the canal which further enhanced the appeal of steam and brought forward the demise of wind-powered commercial transport. By the early 20th century, transportation by sailing ship had all but disappeared.

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Also today…..

Prior to World War II, the Nazis annexed the Sudetenland, a section of Czechoslovakia bordering Germany, home to a significant German population. This was part of the appeasement in which Britain and France agreed to the annexation to prevent further war with Germany.
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The Czechoslovakian government wasn’t consulted. The Nazi’s didn’t consult with anyone at all as they extended their remit into Prague and beyond.
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Eighty-five years ago today, 17 November 1939, the students of Prague rose up to protest against Nazi occupation, catalysed by the murder of medical student Jan Opletal at a previous rally.

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In response, the Nazis stormed university dormitories. 1,850 students were arrested, 1,200 of whom were sent to concentration camps. Nine student leaders were shot dead on the spot.
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For Czechoslovakia, defeat of the Nazis in 1945 proved a double-edged sword. Stalin had ‘liberated’ the country but forty-one years of communist rule would follow, as it did across most of Eastern Europe.
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The sequence of communist control in the Eastern Bloc was eventually broken by Poland, who had ousted the communist government in June 1989.
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This seismic event triggered tremors across the other surpessed countries. The fall of the Berlin Wall followed six months later. Further communist collapses were inevitable.

Eight days after the dramatic events in Berlin, 15,000 Prague students gathered, 17 November 1989, to mark the 50th anniversary of the original 1939 protest.
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After the memorial service, the student mass followed the same route as Jan Opletal’s funeral procession, towards Wenceslas Square. By the time they had arrived, their numbers had swelled to 55,000. The peaceful memorial had morphed into an anti-communist protest.
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The police response was brutal, injuring over 500 students, with reports of some deaths, though never corroborated. The outrage at the police reaction compounded the tension already rising from the actions in Poland and Berlin.

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The following six weeks became known as the Velvet Revolution. Through sheer weight of numbers, good humour and the absence of inflammatory rhetoric, the Czech nation orchestrated a peaceful transfer of power from communism to democratic rule in Czechoslovakia.
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By the end of December 1989, Vaçlav Havel was installed as Czechoslovakia’s first president in the new democratic regime.

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Question of the Week

The Thinker is an iconic bronze sculpture first created in 1884. It was conceived to form part of the sculptor’s work, The Gates of Hell. This was to be an ambitious sculpture inspired by Inferno, Dante Alighieri’s depiction of hell from his poem The Divine Comedy.

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The project was abandoned but The Thinker survived and has now been cast in multiple sites around the world, symbolising the human quest for knowledge and understanding.
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Which French sculptor created The Thinker?

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And Finally…

When I was 12, I went on a family trip to Melbourne, Australia to visit the 'Australian Winduss' clan. Forty-eight years later, my strongest memory is walking into Auntie Grace’s living room and hearing, 'When I Kissed the Teacher', blaring out from the record player.
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It was sung by the up-and-coming band Abba. Their album, 'Arrival' would continue to blare out for the entire time we stayed in North Caulfield.
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Today marks the 50th anniversary of the start of Abba’s first tour outside of their home country, Sweden, 17 November 1974.
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Agnetha, Anni-Frid, Benny and Björn had rocked the pop world in the January with their song, 'Waterloo', surely the Eurovision Song Contest’s finest hour.

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If you’re not from what is loosely described as Europe - I got a little confused with the addition of Israel in 1973 and, latterly, Australia in 2015 - you may not be aware of the Eurovision Song Contest.
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In short, it is an annual gathering of mad people dressed in outlandish costumes, a cultural car crash. The looney-tunes on offer bear little resemblance to national musical identities. Chemically induced performances are as memorable in the moment as they are forgettable straight after.

It wasn’t always like this. As television developed throughout the 1950s, the Eurovision Song Contest was conceived as an opportunity for the newly formed European Broadcasting Union to present a live, simultaneous broadcast across the continent.
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The show continued through the 60s. Substantially, it was a national competition for singers and the musical compositions they sung. The two years prior to 1974 were won by Luxembourg with two beautiful ballads performed by Vicky Leandros and, subsequently, Anne-Marie David.

Then along came Abba. They appeared on stage in their tight, bright, shiny outfits and woke the viewers up with a high-tempo rendition that was unusual and entirely unexpected.
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Yes, they had the required singing credentials, but they offered more. The melody was extremely catchy and those harmonies between Agnetha and Anni-Frid were captivating.
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Everyone in the UK seemed to watch the performance that night, even my father, a rather serious and restrained Aussie, more used to Don Giovanni than Dancing Queen. It affected us all.
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The rest is history, as they say. Abba won the competition and went on to become a world phenomenon. And the journey to connect with the rest of the world had started that night at the Falkoner Centret in Copenhagen, Denmark, 50 years ago.

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Today, Abba are arguably more popular than ever. Benny and Bjorn have crafted an extraordinary legacy through the Mamma Mia musical and later film adaptions, re-releases of old hits, one or two new songs and the breathtaking Abba Voyage experience in London.
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I haven’t seen Voyage but family and friends have described watching the digital avatars of young Agnetha, Anna-Frid, Benny and Björn timelessly performing their greatest hits as absolutely magical.
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​Long may they continue.

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Steve

HOST & CHIEF STORY HUNTER

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P:S: Incidentally, I am always keen to receive your feedback to help me continuously improve this newsletter and the podcast. Just hit reply to this email and...... let it rip! I respond to every email that I receive.

Question of the week... Answer

The French sculptor who created The Thinker was Auguste Rodin, who died 107 years ago today, 17 November 1917.
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