… and some of the people came out of the oven vulcanised, because the Gods, in their wisdom, knew that they would need to be particularly resistant to rainfall. And they became the Irish … Just kidding, JR.
Rubbers are legal now in the ‘Emerald Isle’! Begorrah!
IIRC it was J.P. Donleavy in his 1960s book The Ginger Man who had one of his characters see used condoms floating down the Liffey and observe that they were waterproof socks, or something along those lines.
Yes, and those same gods, ever generous to the Irish, turned the oven off before they’d dried the peat out enough to be coal. 
(I know it’s long and immense pressure that’s required to convert peat into coal, but the facts would interfere with my response.)
Many years ago - long before Little Rubber Objects and Other Strange Devices became legal in Ireland - large quantities of letters coming into Ireland through the post were, let us say, French, at least in contents. This occasioned considerable inconvenience for our Customs service which - notwithstanding the fact that it was in all probability controlled by officials who were card-carrying members of the Knights of Saint Columbanus - frankly had better things to do than intercepting this sort of contraband. At one point, one of the Revenue service’s senior officials (a Knight if ever I saw one) proposed to a middle-ranking official of the Department of Finance that this problem should be addressed by informally reclassifying condoms as “adult clothing”, which was VAT zero-rated at the time, thus disempowering the use of purely Revenue powers to intercept them in the post. This happy arrangement was agreed, and survived for some months - until a very senior Department of Finance official/Knight of Columbanus-type discovered the arrangement, and ordered that it be abandoned. I kid you not. I could not make this up. And also … I Was There … JR.
You don’t need to kid me.
When I was admitted to the bar here some 35 years ago, there were pockets of Catholic / Irish triumph in the public service (pretty much the same way there are now with Indians / Sri Lankans but a surprising absence of equally large or larger ethnic groups of similarly recent arrival, some of which have eschewed the public service for much bigger incomes for even less work in largely unregulated, albeit irregular, industries to do with popular powders, and I don’t mean cosmetics).
The land titles registrar when I was admitted was, IIRC, a Mannix or similar (probably preceded by F. X.) and his underlings were Dohertys and Murphys and the like.
Down here they were the Knights of Columbus, with youthful variants, notably the Holy Name Society, who sat in the front pews with their proud black and white banners announcing their presence. On the other side of the aisle were the Daughters of Mary in their blue capes or veils (can’t recall which), similarly bannered, and a source of eternal frustration to pubescent boys like me (I was well over the holy altar boy phase by then), which is why I spent a lot of time with the more malleable girls from the state high school who were not inhibited by the endless guilt imbued by a Catholic education which I fought heroically to overcome in their relatively liberal presence.
Perhaps a university researcher somewhere would want to study this thread as an example of how things drift off topic? Or maybe its just a demonstration of how the loose mind seems to have a preference to turning towards things sexual? Would the research qualify as psychology, sociology, or what?
In New York, they were called “Coney island Whitefish” IIRC.
Ah, the joys of naughty catholic convent-girls… doing their bit to gather some juicily authentic confessional content…
Mind you some of those hard bitin’ lifer monks/nuns would give the Nippon nasties a run for their money in practices of fanatical cruelty…
Had a good yarn session with the old boy PNG veteran today…
He reckoned that he got the fright of his life once while on picket duty up the jungle…
Having a bit of an on-duty doze when awakened by a soldier of the Emperor…
Amazingly [& fortunately for Bill] the Japanese wished to surrender…
Most unusual… but subsequent to an interrogative check the reason was clear…
Even duty to the God-Emperor had limits & being on the menu for your comrades was beyond it…
I shit you not… cannibalism… due to logistical problems…
Nothing remarkable about cannibalism by the Japanese, although it was rare. They ate their own; their enemies; and even consumed enemy organs by the likes of Col. Tsujii in a primitive ritual supposed to give the consumer the strength of the defeated enemy (which is an inherently illogical exercise by all cultures which think they will gain strength by consuming part of someone they have defeated).
Cannibalism by the Japanese was well established in desperate circumstances in the Gona / Buna / Sanananda reduction as early as late 1942, and indeed I’ve read references to it in the diaries of Japanese troops under siege in that campaign.
The Japanese don’t have a monopoly on eating their own in desperate circumstances, as illustrated by the case of R v Dudley & Stephens and others long before WWII http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens and the much more recent famous Andes plane crash cannibalism.
As for your PNG veteran “having a bit of an on-duty doze when awakened by a soldier of the Emperor”, the Australian soldiers I know and have known who served against the Japanese and in Korea and Vietnam, and I know from my own service during the Vietnam era, would regard “having a doze” on what was apparently a forward picquet position in the face of the enemy as a gross breach of his duty to his mates and richly deserving of the harsh punishment which should come from having allowed an enemy soldier to get close enough to wake him up while on picquet.
Bill [the old digger] reckons that his most in his unit were pretty crook [ill] too,
…as worn out by the jungle as the Japanese were…
…if somewhat better fed… & I don’t think he was literally asleep, more ‘caught napping’… & he wasn’t punished…
He was a bit of a unit mascot really… some of his AIF African-war veteran mates took him under their purview…
As a Kiwi with some Maori blood ancestry, I am aware of the cultural/nutritional cross values inherent in cannibalism…
Although, for them it was a way of literally & usefully turning enemies into shit…
…as well as metaphysically enslaving any ‘Mana’ [ prestige/repute] that an enemy of renown may have had…
Fair enough. Sorry.
I mistook it from the way you referred to “having a bit of an on-duty doze” that he was a sloppy soldier.
It was certainly the case that many Australian soldiers were exhausted, undernourished, and ill from malaria (which accounted for a lot more casualties than battle wounds) and many other diseases, notably dysentery, at various stages of the PNG campaign, notably the Kokoda retreat and the Gona etc reduction. As indeed were the Americans at Buna.
But so were the Japanese, and usually worse off, notably on their Kokoda retreat and especially the Gona etc reduction where they were often reduced to a pitiful state because of the failure of their lines of communication, but kept fighting nonetheless.
Yes, there is no reason to believe that malaria was any less of a problem for the Japanese than it was for Caucasian soldiers. The “White Man’s Death” of 19th century Africa is a serious, chronic problem even, to a great extent, for people who live in a highly malarial environment. Malaria was certainly killing and periodically incapacitating soldiers on both sides who had contracted it long, long after the end of the war. Best regards, JR.
What is not generally understood is that the absence of effective anti-malarial drugs for the Japanese while the the Australians (Allies?) in New Guinea had such drugs put the seriously ill Japanese at a huge disadvantage in their ability to fight their, at least as far as malaria was concerned, quite healthy opponents from 1944 onwards.
I posted a link to a more detailed and learned article on this topic on this forum some years ago, but can’t find it now. This is an adequate summary.
In the New Guinea campaign of World War II, the control of malaria by the Australian-developed drug atebrin was a powerful contributor to victory. Before atebrin, in December 1943, the incidence of malaria in Australian troops in New Guinea (except the Aitape-Wewak area) was a staggering 750 cases per 1000 per year. After atebrin prophylaxis was introduced, this fell to less than 50 cases per 1000 per year in September 1944. During the same period, malaria rates in the Japanese army approached 100%, with mortality at a steady 10%.
http://www.defence.gov.au/health/infocentre/journals/ADFHJ_apr04/ADFHealth_5_1_02.html
As I’ve also mentioned before, even simple measures such as Australians in New Guinea being ordered to roll down their sleeves before dusk had measurably useful effects.
The Japanese were doubly unfortunate as their excellent medical services from the Russo-Japanese war saw a decline by WWII as the idiotic notion of ‘spirit’ was spruiked as being able to overcome disease.
The major achievements of Japanese medical research during WWII came out of Harbin, being utterly pointless cruelty, while the Allies refined antiobiotic treatments, anti-malarial treatments, and so on. Without any of the pointless cruelty of the Japanese. Not that the Allies lacked brutality in their own medical experimentation.
Australia tests mustard gas on its own soldiers in wartime. http://www.ozatwar.com/mustard.htm
America tests anything on anyone in peace and war, but mostly prisoners and the disabled. http://www.aolnews.com/2011/02/27/horrific-us-medical-experiments-come-to-light/
Britain confines its serious testing to sheep: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/1457035.stm
New Zealand avoids testing anything potentially harmful on sheep, for well known reasons.
Actually, I’d say the biggest medical advance of the allies was DDT. That will have had a major effect not just on Malaria, but on a significant number of other insect-transmitted diseases as well.
It is strange, nonetheless, that Japanese arrangements to control malaria were, clearly, so completely inadequate. Admittedly, malaria is not exactly curable, and prophylaxis against it is much more advanced today than was the case in the 1940s. However, quinine has been known as a reasonably effective treatment for malaria attacks since the 17th century (although its mechanism was not understood until towards the end of the 19th), and the medical literature of the early 1930s was already discussing the pros and cons of quinine-related drugs like Atebrin as treatments for malaria, either solely or in combination. Another example, perhaps, of the same cultural blinkering that seems to have prevented the Japanese from forming a rounded view of the value of armour ? A technological issue ? I am not sure.
On a not wholly unrelated note, while trawling through the malarial swamps, I came across an article on the University of Salford website by Douglas Ford, entitled “Dismantling the ‘Lesser Men’ and ‘Supermen’ Myths: US Intelligence on the Imperial Japanese Army after the fall of the Philippines, Winter 1942 to Spring, 1943” which is viewable at http://usir.salford.ac.uk/19102 (PDF accepted draft). Though, then again, perhaps the question of US Intelligence (or,early on, lack of intelligence) should find a place in its own thread ? Best regards, JR.
Whereas the G & T soaked Brits & sundry other colonials knew full well that a decently constant serum level
of ETOH & Quinine extract did the job…
Unit 731, talk about Evil Scientists… Ugh…
But I’d reckon maybe my grandfather was a particularly evil scientist… he developed several quite nasty
strains of cancer…[ joke… sort of…]…
As for the quality of NZ sheepmeat, mmmm…delicious grass-fed, not dirt/dry-fed like ah…arid places…
I am constantly aware of the supreme irony that the lowly new world potato first “saved” the Irish and whose later “failure” forced the Irish to emigrate to the new world whence came the humble potato to begin with.
Our experience in the states was rather the reverse: non-Catholic boys were quite likely to “run the bases” and hit “home plate” with frustrated Catholic schoolgirls than their heathen sisters educated in co-ed establishments.