Workers and the bomb

The current ITV series in which Billy Connolly travels by motorbike across America on Route 66 is pretty formulaic stuff but the ten minutes of last night's episode I saw contained an interesting bit.

He passed through Los Alamos, New Mexico, home during the Second World War to the Manhattan Project, the US government's programme to build an atomic bomb.  An elderly guy who'd worked there as a machinist after being transferred from the Ford Motor factory in Detroit told him how him and his workmates had climbed into the mountains and watched the weapon being tested.  After seeing the power of the explosion, they started a petition against it being unleashed against civilians which hundreds of workers signed.  It reached the US Defense Secretary who refused to pass it on to the President.

I think it's pretty hard to argue that wiping cities off the face of the earth and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people wasn't a war crime and that Harry Truman by rights shouldn't have been in the dock at Nuremberg. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was supported by the majority of the US population. A major factor in that was the way anti-Japanese racism had been whipped up during the war, describing the enemy in the Pacific as sub-human for example. I doubt there would have been the same feeling about the atomic bomb if it was German or Italian cities that had been targetted.

Adios Carlos?

The reaction of most Manchester City fans to the apparent refusal of Argentinean striker Carlos Tevez to come off the bench for the last half hour of their 2-0 defeat to Bayern Munich the other night has been simple: "Sack him". The club's lawyers are also reportedly looking at whether City can dismiss him for gross misconduct, i.e. without notice, and thereby save themselves a couple of million or so.

On the face of it you would think a disciplinary charge of gross misconduct would be hard to prove given it's normally something so serious or criminal that it immediately voids the employment contract but we're in the parallel world of Premier League football here so who knows. 

City would of course prefer to cash in Tevez's transfer value so him sitting at home in Buenos Aires on a quarter of a million a week until they can sell him in January seems the more likely option.  That has happened in cases which are clearly gross misconduct like stubbing out a cigar in a youth player's eye at a Christmas party, being arrested for assaulting a team mate on the training pitch or being sent to prison for beating a teenager unconscious in the street (step forward Joey Barton for all three) so I will be amazed if the Gulf sheiks who own City sanction him being sent down the road without a penny.

The next tram to Chorlton

I went to a beer festival at South West Manchester Cricket Club last weekend.  It was the first time I'd travelled on the new South Manchester tram line, part of Manchester Metrolink's plan to expand to Ashton-under-Lyne, Chorlton-cum-Hardy and Manchester Airport by 2016.

As the tram headed down the spur just south of Trafford Bar and pulled into Chorlton-cum-Hardy, I thought about how the expansion is replacing stations and services cut in the infamous Beeching Axe of the 1960's.

Chorlton-cum-Hardy's new Metrolink station is on the site of the railway station that stood there from 1880 to 1967.  The comedy singers Flanders and Swann even bemoaned its closure in their song "Slow Train":

"No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat, At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street."

Dad's Army

The television writer David Croft who has died aged 89 is best known for co-writing Dad's Army.  I had a distant family connection to Croft - my mum's uncle was his cousin - but never met him.

That a comedy about the antics of a Home Guard unit in World War II was nearly not commissioned because some at the BBC thought it disrespectful to those who had served in the war seems strange now that it is rightly regarded as as a TV classic.

Comedies about army life had of course been done before and not just in Britain - another of my favourite shows is Sergeant Bilko - but what sets Dad's Army apart is the way it pokes fun at British class structures. The Home Guard unit in the fictional small town in which it is set replicates these - the bank manager is the captain, the butcher the corporal and the bank clerk the sergeant. The sergeant however is from an upper-class background and a lot of the humour derives from his effortless superiority over the pompous Captain Mainwaring:

A river runs through them

The Guardian today ran a short piece about the move of BBC programmes to "Salford Quays in Manchester".  As you might guess from the name, Salford Quays is in Salford, not Manchester.

It's a common mistake. I've lost count of the number of times I've read "Salford, Manchester" and seen references to Coronation Street (based on a street in Salford) as a Manchester soap. I can sort of understand the mistake if people are not from the area.  But for a journalist on a national newspaper, the former Manchester Guardian no less, to make it is just sloppy.  It's as bad as saying the House of Commons is in the City of London.

Salford and Manchester have been separate cities since the 1200's.  Salford has its own university, cathedral and rugby league team.  And just to make the division clear, the two cities are separated by the River Irwell: like the other twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, you need to cross a bridge to get from one to the other.

Language is our nature

Stephen Fry's new series on language started on BBC2 last night.  Having studied language acquisition years ago when I was doing a part-time teaching course at Manchester College of Arts and Technology, I was familiar with those whose theories he outlined, Chomsky, Pinker (and Krashen who surprisingly wasn't mentioned by name) but there was also a lot of interesting stuff about DNA and language.

Fry's pretty watchable whatever he's talking about and if you missed it I recommend watching it here.

The satellite has landed

I don't understand the nervousness of some people about the satellite that landed in the early hours of this morning and whose whereabouts are currently unknown. The astronomer I saw on Channel 4 News last night was at pains to point out the improbability of it hitting land, let alone inhabited areas or people.

I'd be quite excited if a bit of it landed in the garden. And if you could keep it quiet from NASA, what a souvenir to have. Even if it clipped off a few roof tiles, it'd make for an interesting call to the insurance company (although they've probably got a space exemption clause).