BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Coronavirus: Food’s frontline heroes - "‘I've been driving a truck for almost 35 years now… This is my lifetime dream. This is the only thing I've ever wanted to do. I wanted to follow my my dad's footsteps and my grandfather's footsteps and, you know, most of the kids growing up, they all wanted to be doctors and lawyers and firemen and policemen. I wanted to be a truck driver.’… I've done a lot of disasters, hurricanes, tornadoes, and we have never gotten the attention that we're getting right now. It's amazing that I'm traveling up and down the highways, how many thumbs up I get, how many fist pumps were, you know, they want me to blow the air horn. Actually being able to see people on the overpasses holding some signs: We love you truckers. Well I guess now because it's a national crisis, well a global crisis actually, people are really understanding how vital trucking is to their everyday life, how vital we are to make sure those hospitals are supplied and how the grocery stores, all that stuff just doesn't magically appear on the shelves. It's being delivered by truck."
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, What next for restaurants? - "‘High rent means that restaurants really struggle to survive. To give you an idea of the cost of rent for restaurants, around 20 to 25% of restaurants’ cost is based on rent at the moment. And normally for a sustainable business that rate should be about 10 to 15%.’
‘And these high rents have a knock on effect onto the entire business. To operate on such tiny profit margins, you need to sell lots of food. So that even if you're only making 5% on a dish, if you sell enough of them, overall you'll make a reasonable sum of money. That often means opening more restaurants or doing takeout. But Jonathan says this doesn't always work out, especially if you need private investors to expand, which may put fast returns before quality. And:’
‘It also means that a lot more restaurants have to rely on delivery services. So we're talking services like Deliveroo and Just Eat. But the problem is, is that lots of these delivery companies take very cutthroat margins. So we're talking about 20, 25 30%. But very soon, they become indispensable to the restaurant, even though the margins mean they’re actually not making a huge amount of profit from them. The other thing which high rents and increased competition makes necessary is PR. And the reason why I find PR so harmful, one, it kind of inculcates this relationship of money to success. So that the more, the more essentially, the more money you have to spend on PR in the first place, the more likely your restaurant will get written about. And often these restaurants aren't the restaurants which actually serving quality food. And it means that the restaurants which actually are serving great food, but don't have the money to afford a PR eventually get forgotten about.’
‘And so why is it that restaurants can't just raise their prices to make their rent sort of a smaller proportion of their profit?’
‘For most people, the cost of eating out in London is already too high. Lots of people don't really realize the costs that go into food. And to justify a price increase would mean educating a customer about all those things. And that's not necessarily just about the food. It's about how the food is presented, about the atmosphere.’"
Cooking For Winston Churchill | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "You get the First World War, which does put a stop to the silliness and it does an awful lot of things. But it does put a stop to the Edwardian silliness and menus which were habitually nine or 10 courses get pared down to only five or six. At Blenheim they were 28 courses. But that's really over the top. You get in the 1920s and 30s more of a focus on ingredients now, you get market gardens are beginning to flourish a lot, whereas the old style gardens and country houses where you could force anything out of season, they are starting to be less of a thing. You can still grow a pineapple if you want to. You’re also getting you know Dole, Dole company is now importing pineapple so is there really any point in growing your pineapple when you can buy it in a tin? So there's a change in what you can get hold of and the prestige of ingredients. Some things never go out of fashion, I mean, the Churchills ate plovers’ eggs like there was no- Plovers’ eggs. Honestly, the one thing that comes up so much, plovers eggs, they’re a small wading bird, completely illegal to eat a polover’s egg today. The 1920s and 30s see this increased sort of interest in ingredients and freshness. There's also a real interest in worldwide food in the 1920s and 30s. There's been an interest for a long time but you do start to see especially recipe books which obviously always are very aspirational, but they're published and you get more recipe books that deal with Italian food, or Chinese food, or recipes from lots and lots of different nations. And America is sort of starting to raise its head. It's somewhere that we could look to really for the first time. And so you get these absolutely ghastly composite salads in particular from America. So if you imagine putting grapefruit and fish and mayonnaise and red pepper all in the same dish, that's your American composite salad. And then the Americans go one step further and then put all of that into a jello or aspic, normally dyed green. And this is vogue for sort of jellied salads, which are one of the nastiest things you could imagine eating ever... it's also the era where sugar peaks. So we more sugar in the 50s than we've ever eaten per capita since. And having cooked the food from that era. It is, some of it, teeth meltingly sweet"
Tom Ellis On The Incredible Story Of Apllo 13 | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "I think kind of when you have had problems within a spacecraft, there were some Soviet missions in the late 70s, early 1980s. Where you have these guys up there for months at a time, and they start to get on each other's nerves. There's a, one case in the, I think in the early 80s, where a, one cosmonaut becomes very offended that another cosmonaut doesn't like his poetry"
Ghee Bowman On Indian Soldiers At Dunkirk | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘There was a lot of controversy surrounding Christopher Nolan's blockbuster film, Dunkirk, a couple of years back. And the conspicuous absence of Indian troops within that. I mean, do you see that film as being something of a missed opportunity in telling the Indian contingent story?’
‘It was a great film. I really liked that film. And I think he, Nolan made a lot of, you know, artistic choices to focus it quite narrowly. And I think, I think I would say that if probably the French have a greater right to be aggrieved by what was omitted, or how they were presented in that film. Yeah, and he completely omitted any mention or any shot of the Indian soldiers. But then there was 630 amongst 238,000. And they were there at a particular time, or two particular times. And I don't know, I mean, I think, I think the opportunity is still there. I think, because it is there, because they're very visual. They're very visually appealing, these soldiers, you know, they look interesting. They've got mules, they've got turbans, you know, they're singing and dancing literally, on occasion. So I think there's another film that's out there begging to be made, you know, by some Gurinder Chadha or some great British Asian filmmaker, take this idea and make it a whole new film about it. And I think you know, I'm sure Christopher Nolan will be happy to see that as everyone else will be.’"
Henry Hemming On The Real Spies Who Inspired Bond | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘I think his mother certainly played a part in inspiring the name M. You've talked about Miss Moneypenny. There are a couple of candidates there, but there's no obvious candidate. And I think in terms of the style of that relationship is very innuendo heavy, flirtatious. All the evidence suggests Flemming just did not have that with the people who are meant to have inspired Moneypenny. There's also Q, and there is a real person who ran something called Q branch and what's called Charles Fraser Smith. And he during the Second World War ran this, this department which invented incredible gadgets that people working for SOE or commander units such as the one Fleming was involved in would go to to get these gadgets before they went into occupied Europe. And usually these were everyday objects that had some kind of weapon or tool hidden inside them such as a invisible inks, there was garlic flavored chocolate for British agents heading to France, which, had all sorts of problems with, this was to try and make them blend in with the local population. I mean, this suggests that French people were eating garlic non stop which I don't think they were at the time but also garlic flavored chocolate, that's, that's never going to work. Another one which I read about and again I've got problems with is the shoestring which was also a garotte, because if you wear a garotte as a shoestring it's not really going to work as a shoestring. Anyway, this is legend has it, these are some of the things that the real Q branch produced. And Fleming knew all about this. He described a Q branch in the books. He didn't actually describe a Q in the books, but he was involved in helping to oversee the scripting of the films. And I'm sure he played a part in the birth of that character onscreen.’...
‘The villains. And because I mean, it seems from what your article lays out that it’s a bit of a case of be careful, you'll end up in my novel definitely.’...
‘He's being bullied at school by two particular prefects. One was called Blofeld, the other was called Scaramanga, and Fleming obviously decided enough was enough, he’s going to get his revenge… Goldfinger. That was another one. The Bond villain Auric Goldfinger was, was very much inspired by Ernő Goldfinger who was the modernist architect. Ian Fleming did not like his buildings. Plenty of people in London did not. None of them had the kinds of reach that Fleming did. And Goldfinger tried to take him to court. He tried to sue him, tried to halt the publication of the book. I think at one point, Fleming suggested he had renamed Goldfinger as Goldprick, but the publisher thought that was just gonna make things worse. And I think there was some kind of compromise where they were going to sort of downplay the name Goldfinger in the publicity. But essentially, yeah, it was unchanged. And I think Goldfinger was furious for, for the rest of his life about that'"
The Mistresses Of Charles II | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "The mistress who became his his chief mistress during all of the decade of the 1660s was the notorious beauty Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine and later Duchess of Cleveland. She came from a royalist family who had stayed in England throughout the civil wars and been quiet. She appears to have had a rather more colorful lifestyle during the protectorate than is generally associated with that period of time. She had other relationships, the most notable of which was with the Earl of Chesterfield. She may or may not have been involved in lesbian relationships as well, but she almost certainly refers in one of her letters to her love of the Earl of Chesterfield, where she invites him to come for an afternoon meeting with a friend, which I think is probably one of the earliest recorded threesomes in English history. I mean, they weren't talking about tea and biscuits, put it that way"
How to explain gender differences in fear of crime: Towards an evolutionary approach - "Employing data from a sample of 610 Dutch high school students and their parents, this article argues in favour of an evolutionary explanation for the fact that women are more fearful of crime than men while they are less often victimized. With respect to a variety of events that involved physical injury, varying from robbery to being involved in a car accident, female respondents were, compared to male respondents, more fearful of every event, judged every single event to be more harmful, and consistently rated their own probability to experience these events in the future as higher. The findings suggest that fear of crime among women does not represent a real higher risk of being victimized, is not primarily linked to the risk of being raped, and is not an isolated phenomenon. Indeed, women seem in general more fearful of all kinds of events that might imply a physical injury. The observed gender differences were not influenced by the degree of traditionality of the family of the respondents as expressed in status differences between the parents, in the division of household tasks, and in having an intact family. The gender differences could neither be explained by a perceived norm that boys must be more risk taking than girls. It is concluded that the observed gender differences may be the result of sexual selection that favoured risk-taking and status fights among males, and being cautious and protecting one's offspring among females."
Kyūjō incident - Wikipedia - "It happened on the night of 14–15 August 1945, just before the announcement of Japan's surrender to the Allies. The coup was attempted by the Staff Office of the Ministry of War of Japan and many from the Imperial Guard to stop the move to surrender.The officers murdered Lieutenant General Takeshi Mori of the First Imperial Guards Division and attempted to counterfeit an order to the effect of occupying the Tokyo Imperial Palace (Kyūjō). They attempted to place the Emperor under house arrest, using the 2nd Brigade Imperial Guard Infantry."
Presumably the people who claim that the atomic bombs were just to intimidate the Soviets and Truman was a war criminal because of the bombs think this was a false flag
Would Japan have surrendered without the atomic bombings? - "There were two broad camps among Japan’s war leadership in August 1945, according to Hasegawa’s research.The war camp maintained that Japan must inflict tremendous damage on the Americans in order to win better terms than the “unconditional surrender” offered by President Franklin Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference in 1945.The peace camp contended that ending the war as soon as possible was the best way to achieve both camps’ overriding goal: retaining the emperor system...Japan’s war camp believed that the Soviet Union would eventually help broker a peace deal. Even after Stalin ended a neutrality pact with Japan in April 1945 and began massing troops toward Japanese-held territory, Japanese leaders held fast to this fantasy, Hasegawa said...Hiroshima was the latest bombing victim, albeit with a terrifying new weapon. However, Japanese forces still retained several divisions in Kyushu that prepared for an American invasion.“The highest decision-making body was not even convened after Hiroshima,” Hasegawa said. “The cabinet was divided. The atomic bomb was effective enough that for the first time, cabinet decision-makers decided to really terminate the war. But on what conditions, they were totally divided.”...Even after the bombs and the Soviet invasion, some of Japan’s hawks weren’t ready to stop fighting, according to some historians.Gen. Korechika Anami, Japan’s minister of war, called for conditions that the world wouldn’t have recognized as surrender.Anami wanted retention of the emperor, self-disarmament, no foreign occupation, and trial of any Japanese war criminals by Japan itself, according to “The Rising Sun,” John Toland’s 1971 Pulitzer Prize-winning history of Japan’s war empire.Emperor Hirohito, who had thus far stayed above the fray, put the debate over prolonging the war to an end when he called for a surrender...Declassified archives show a great deal of disagreement among U.S. officials over Soviet involvement in Japan...“The documentary evidence is overwhelming that Truman wanted the Soviets to enter the war and that on Aug. 8, he was very pleased to learn that they had done so,” Kort said.""