Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Drama, Screenplay

Body of Evidence: ‘The Burning Question’

SERIES: CRIME FILE INVESTIGATIONS

. Intro & Preamble Note: ‘Body of Evidence’ – includes cast and personnel list/glossary of terms

A series of crime scenes that will require the reader to apply their forensic skills in solving the mysteries.

Burton walked into the restaurant’s kitchen; its stainless steel and tile surfaces were covered in soggy soot and burnt debris. The sprinklers had been shut off over an hour ago, but the overhead fixtures still dripped steadily. He brought head chef Nathan Olivo in with him, careful to keep the distraught man away from any evidence.

“I hope you like your steak well done,” said Mike Trellis, Burton’s CSI technician. He specialised in arson investigation and bad jokes. Burton laughed, the chef did not.

Trellis was using a fuel sniffer, which looked like a small cane attached to a lunch box, to check areas of the kitchen for traces of accelerant. Petrol and paraffin were the most common, but he had seen arsonists use everything from Silly String to hair spray to start a fire.

“What happened here?” Burton asked.

“It was about half an hour after we closed. We were all in the bar toasting the end of the night when the kitchen just blew up. I started the toast tradition a few weeks ago when we got a mediocre review in the local restaurant guide. The toast is supposed to build morale and create team atmosphere – everyone was pretty down after that review. But the bad food wasn’t our fault, it was the stove.”

“The stove?” Burton said. “Was there a problem with it?”

“Problem? It was a piece of garbage,” Olivo said. “Always burning entrées, scalding sauces and stinking of gas; the pilot light for one of the burners kept going out. I asked the manufacturers to replace it several times, but they refused, saying it was fine.”

Trellis walked over to the blackened stove, the sniffer leading the way.

“Thank you, Mr Olivo,” Burton said, leading him towards the door. “Please step outside with the other employees and we’ll finish up in here.”

Burton shined his flashlight around the kitchen. “The room looks like there was a sudden explosion rather than a slow burn,” he said. “And soot is covering just about every surface in here – walls, counters and especially the ceiling and ceiling fans – so whatever happened, it sent residue everywhere. But what burned in order to make the soot? Soot results from imperfect burning, and gas burns cleanly, with no residue. I can’t believe the kitchen had enough dust to cause this mess.” Burton looked again at the ceiling and the black film covering it. “Wait a minute. Were the ceiling fans on when the kitchen blew?”

Trellis checked his notes. “The fan switch was in the on position, but the explosion knocked out the electricity, so they weren’t spinning for long. The big exhaust ducts up there were off for the night.”

“Let’s try to get a fingerprint off that fan switch,” Burton said. He climbed onto the stainless-steel island in the middle of the kitchen and took a closer look at one of the ceiling fans. It was caked with black soot, as was the ceiling above it. He reached above the fan and ran his finger along the top side of one of the blades. It came back with a white substance on it. Burton smelled it once, then touched it to his tongue.

“Mmm. Tastes like arson,” he said.

How did he know?

– Author’s note: No solution to this case will be made public.

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Arts, Books, Britain, History

Book Review – ‘1919: A Land Fit For Heroes’

REVIEW

During July 1919, the Mayor of Luton planned a lavish banquet to celebrate peace after the end of the First World War the previous year. His invitations extended to friends and cronies, but deliberately excluded the ex-servicemen who had fought in the war.

A riot ensued. Luton Town Hall was torched. With bitter irony, onlookers sang Ivor Novello’s wartime song “Keep The Home Fires Burning” as the flames consumed the building.

In his wide-ranging survey of the 12 months after the Armistice, Mike Hutton reveals the turbulence that spread throughout Britain during 1919. It was not the “land fit for heroes” returning soldiers had been promised. Many were unemployed, unemployable or were forced to beg on the streets.

Resentments festered. Civil unrest rocked cities throughout Britain. In Glasgow, strikers were faced by troops armed with machine guns, backed up by tanks.

In Liverpool, even the police came out on strike. For four days, there was what one local newspaper called “an orgy of looting and rioting”. Soldiers opened fire in an attempt to restore order. Hundreds were arrested.

Social disorder and anarchy were not the only problems the country faced. The Spanish flu was at its height. As Hutton notes: “Someone who was feeling perfectly healthy at breakfast could be dead by teatime”. More than 200,000 people perished. Coffins made for the war dead were used for victims of the influenza pandemic.

At the same time, fear of crime was high. In the aftermath of the war, many unlicensed firearms were in circulation. A spate of robberies was carried out by men “grown callous after four years’ experience of killing”. More than a dozen murderers were sent to the scaffold. Several were former soldiers who had returned home to discover their wives had found other lovers.

Hutton’s book is not all despair, though. With the war over, people were out to enjoy themselves. Sport resumed: the cricket County Championship was reinstated and won by Yorkshire.

Professional football began a new season in August. The American golfer Walter Hagen, who had just won the U.S. Open, arrived in London to stay at the Savoy. He celebrated his visit by going up to the roof of the hotel and driving a ball across the Thames.

Hagen was not the only famous visitor from the United States. Londoners were given a taste of a new music when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band opened their UK tour at the London Hippodrome in April 1919. The band members were all white, but, the jazz craze soon spread and other, black musicians began to cross the Atlantic.

One newspaper critic was appalled by “the jungle elements of the dance” and wrote of the primitive rituals and orgies that were detected. The younger generation loved the music.

With Europe no longer a war zone, continental travel was possible for those who could afford it, although the tours of the Flanders battlefields advertised for 16 guineas may not have been to everyone’s taste. The aerodrome on Hounslow Heath inaugurated the first international air service with regular flights to Le Bourget, near Paris.

Hutton describes Britain in 1919 as, “like a boxer who, despite being declared the winner, has been punched to the point of exhaustion”.

This is an entertaining book that delivers a vivid portrait of a country poised between war and peace.

– 1919: A Land Fit For Heroes by Mike Hutton is published by Amberley for £20, 320pp

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Arts, Education, History, Science

Quantum Leaps: Hipparchus

C. 170–125 BC

HIPPARCHUS spent long periods taking measurements of the earth’s position in relation to the stars. The results enabled him to make several important findings and calculations.

. The Precession of The Equinoxes

He discovered what is now known as the “precession of the equinoxes” by comparing his own observations with those noted by Timocharis of Alexandria a century and a half previously together with earlier recordings from Babylonia. What Hipparchus soon realised was that by taking into account any observational errors made by his predecessors, the points at which the equinox (the two occasions during the year when day and night are of equal length) occurred seemed to move slowly but consistently from east to west against the backdrop of the fixed stars. He gave a value for the annual precession of around 46 seconds of the arc, which is exceptionally close to the modern figure of 50.26 seconds, given the tools and data then available to him.

. The Distance of The Moon

From these observations, Hipparchus was able to make much more accurate calculations on the length of the year, producing a figure that was accurate to within six and a half minutes.

He was also able to correctly determine the lengths of the seasons and offer more exact predictions of when eclipses would take place.

He made observations of the sun’s supposed orbit and attempted to do likewise with the more irregular orbit of the moon. Although partially successful, he could not make entirely accurate calculations.

Using measurements and timings related to the earth’s shadow during eclipses, other attempts were made to determine the size of the sun and moon and their distances from the earth. Again, while not entirely accurate, Hipparchus proposed that the distance of the moon from the earth was 240,000 miles. This is remarkably close to the modern figure.

. A Catalogue of Stars

Perhaps Hipparchus’ most important astronomical achievement was his plotting of the first known catalogue of the stars, despite warnings from some of his contemporaries that he was thus guilty of impiety. He was inspired to begin this work in 134 BC after allegedly seeing a “new star” which prompted his speculation that the stars were not fixed as had previously been thought.

He went on to record the position of 850 stars in the remaining years of his life, a significant achievement given the resources available to him. What is more, he devised a scale for recording a star’s magnitude or brightness: from the most visible (the first magnitude) to the faintest (the sixth). Though amended considerably, it is a scale still used today.

. Developing Trigonometry

Because of the accelerated developments Hipparchus was making in astronomy, he was required to break new ground in other disciplines, particularly mathematics, to facilitate his celestial observations and calculations. Most notably of all, he developed an early version of trigonometry. With no notion of sine available to him, he constructed a table of chords which calculated the relationship between the length of a line joining two points on a circle and the corresponding angle at the centre.

. Further Influence of Hipparchus

Although Hipparchus is considered to be one of the most influential astronomers of the ancient world, it is arguable that his most impacting achievements lay in the areas of mathematics and geography.

The geographer and astronomer Ptolemy cited Hipparchus as his most important predecessor, and he is most often revered for his astronomical measurements and cataloguing. Yet, as the attributed inventor of trigonometry, as well as being the first person to plot places on the earth’s surface using longitude and latitude, his influence has been long lasting and widespread.

He was able to apply his work on the trigonometry of spheres to the planet from which he made his observations. Significantly, he was the first person to use longitude and latitude in his mathematical calculations to position where places were on the earth’s surface. Like so many of Hipparchus’s achievements, it is his further pioneering work that still resonates today.

Hipparchus was born in Nicaea, Bithynia, now in modern Turkey, where he undertook some of his astronomical observations, along with sustained periods in Rhodes and to a lesser extent in Alexandria.

Most of the detail of Hipparchus’s life that has come down to us is taken from Ptolemy’s record of his achievements (because the vast majority of Hipparchus’s original work has been lost).

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