Jenny Joseph has died

And I just noticed when I was looking up the copyright date of her poem, “Warning” (1961).

She died just over a year ago, January 8, 2018.

Her best known poem starts out,

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

And a red hat that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me,

That second line was the inspiration for the Red Hat Society, a social group for older women.

I once used her poem in my blog. I was contacted by her lawyers, who said she was quite assiduous at protecting it. I thanked them for letting me know and removed it. As the copyright line is now works published in 1923, I’ll be dead before it comes out of copyright.

Who made that hat?

Taking a new interest in knitting, I noticed the home-made hat worn by Mick Aston on Time Team, a British archaeology show.

Mick Aston of the Time Team in knitted hat

Sadly, Mick Aston is no longer with us.

Sabadell Bank street performance

I’m not sure if you can call this a flash mob, but it’s a very clever bit of publicity. I love the looks of wonder on some people’s faces.

Jens Voigt crashes out of the Tour de France

In one of the toughest mountain stages of the 2009 Tour de France, Jens Voigt, of the Saxobank team, suffered a severe crash and was taken for medical treatment. He’s out of the tour. Here’s one of the less grisly pictures.

Stage 16, Martigny, Switzerland to Bourg-Saint-Maurice, had very long slopes, with climbs and descents more than 20 km long. That lets a rider get exhausted on the climbs and reach dangerous speeds on the descents.

The profile for Stage 16 looks like this:

Cat welfare

The Scottish government has written a guide to cat care for the clueless. That’s a good idea, because when we are ignorant of something, we don’t know how ignorant we are.

When I was growing up, we “knew” that “cats drink milk,” so we never put out fresh water for our cat—and then were amused when it drank out of the aquarium. There are more books on cat care now, as well as the Internet, but I suppose it doesn’t hurt to have an official source telling people the basics.

In memoriam: Shlomo Arouch

Salamo Arouch, death camp survivor

Shlomo or Salamo Arouch (1923-2009) was an amateur boxer in the Balkans when the Nazis invaded. He and his family, along with thousands of other Greek Jews, were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. On the first day, his mother, sisters, and all the younger children were killed, leaving himself, his father, and his younger brother.

When the Nazis found out that he was a boxer, he was forced to fight for their entertainment while they bet on the outcome. The loser was executed and cremated. At some point he was transferred off the slave labour detail to office work. In two years, he won more than 100 fights, some of them with men who outweighed him by a hundred pounds.

By the time the camp was liberated, his father had died and his brother had been shot on the spot for refusing to pull gold teeth from the mouths of the dead. He was the only survivor from his family.

While searching for members of his family at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, Arouch met 17-year-old Marta Yechiel, from his own home town. After their marriage later that year, in 1948 he emigrated to the fledgling state of Israel and served in the Israeli Army, where he continued to box. In civilian life he ran a successful shipping and moving business in Tel Aviv.

Salamo Arouch’s wife [, Marta,] and four children survive him.

You can read more about Salamo Arouch here.