Monarch’s royal audacity
Published 1:06 pm Saturday, September 25, 2010
Warm-up debate: Is it a “Monday morning you sure look fine” day, or a “Monday, Monday can’t trust that day” day? Or just another “Manic Monday”?
•“Queen tried to get UK poverty fund to heat Buckingham Palace”: In 2004, Queen Elizabeth II sought help to pay the heating bill, somewhere around $1.5 million a year. The fund provides subsidized heating to low-income Britons. The Independent newspaper on Friday published the request, and its denial, after obtaining the documents from a Freedom of Information request.
The official royal response was that the queen, one of the world’s wealthiest people, didn’t understand the fund was for poor people. “My bad,” the queen was not quoted as saying.
The government worker handling the request tried to be gentle while breaking the news to her majesty:
“I also feel a bit uneasy about the probable adverse press coverage if the Palace were given a grant at the expense of, say, a hospital,” the official wrote. “Sorry this doesn’t sound more positive.”
Since it’s public, the official can now publish his or her book containing the hundreds of much-less-gentle responses that he or she has been writing in their head every day since 2004.
While some people were shocked, the jailed Bell, Calif., mayor and city officials issued a statement calling the queen an amateurish piker.
•“World’s oldest man marks 114th birthday in Montana”: Walter Breuning, born Sept. 21, 1896, worked as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway for 50 years. Guinness World Records and the Gerontology Research Group verified Breuning as the world’s oldest man and the fourth-oldest person. Three women were born earlier in the same year as Breuning.
Breuning’s longevity is especially impressive because he actually exists. For decades, it seemed that the world’s oldest people were always found in Japan. Turns out there’s a reason for that. As reported earlier this month:
•“Japan missing more than 230,000 listed centenarians”: The 234,354 people listed with the government as over 100 years old can’t be found and may have died long ago.
May have died?
About 77,000 of them would be at least 120, and 884 people would be 150 or older. The count was ordered last month after the government realized that record-keeping of its elderly population had grown a bit lax. (In July, police discovered that Sogen Kato, who would have been 111 and thought to be Tokyo’s oldest man, had been dead for 32 years and his decayed body was still lying in his home.)
The country’s vaunted reputation for precision appears a little lost in translation.
