[BITList] Ushakov Medals

[John Feltham]

G'day Hugh,

On 12/07/2013, at 19:34 PM, HUGH <chakdara at btinternet.com> wrote:

> Can we envisage a scenario in which some aged veteran of an obscure (obscure in that the powers-that-be reckon it obscure) campaign is hauled from his wheelchair on Armistice (or any other) Day for wearing a medal not on HMQ's permission list?  Or has his door battered down at 3.00am for accepting it? Civil servants, even faceless ones, don't make laws, nor do they make legally enforceable rules of dress. Something they think might be "illegal" in London might be perfectly "legal" in Glasgow.

There are laws in the UK and in this fair land that prohibit men [it is mainly men that do it], from wearing medals to which they have no right to wear. To whit, medals that they were not awarded.

In Australian following ANZAC Day there are always reports in the press, of men being caught wearing medals to which they were not entitled to wear.

You can of course, wear any medals that were awarded to your relatives as long as you wear them on the right hand side of your chest.

> As a footnote, and to cheer you up, I heard on the news this morning that complaints have been made about The Railway Children. Some dimwit suddenly woke from a deep sleep to the realisation that both the book and the film feature children standing at or on a railway line, contrary to Section 6b, Sub-section 18a, of the bla deh bla deh blah. This, they aver, must surely encourage children to stand on or near railway lines.

Such people a called pecksniffs in Australia, a term that I believe originated with Charles Dickens.

> There was a time when people woke up from deep sleeps to more interesting and less disruptive thoughts. Blaise Pascal died with a little note sewn into his clothes: "From half past ten till half past twelve, Fire! 23rd November,1654."  In French, of course. On a morning much earlier in his life he'd written it down when awakened from an ecstatic experience during the night.  It made sense at the time he wrote it, but not next morning when it was the only evidence of what he'd gone through.

The only knowledge that I have of him is the computer language, named after him, that I taught for quite a few years in school, "Pascal". Schools in Australia have now largely moved from Pascal to Delphi.

See…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language)

A language deliberately written with the idea of teaching students about computer languages, or so I understand.


ooroo




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