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I. Marks & Spencer
Dear Sir: I have many items purchased at Marks & Spencer by my peripatetic businessman father, including some beautiful clothes and a fold-up umbrella. Ah, the umbrella! It has never broken, inverted, failed to open or been mislaid without being recognised as mine and returned to me. Having had it for about four years, I call that unusual life span a testimony to British ingenuity.
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If Mrs. Thatcher ever decides to hand over the government to Marks & Spencer, I may emigrate and change my nationality. Or maybe we could import some M&S managers to run our government!
Barbara Pilvin
Philadelphia
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II
Dear Sir: Last summer, as we hosted a city child through the Fresh Air Fund, a garter snake appeared in our woodpile. Geraldo had never seen a snake. Fascinated, he stood just a foot or so away, watching the snake as it warmed in the sunlight. There aren't any snakes in the urban South Bronx. Gerry murmured that he'd like to catch this snake and put it in a bottle to keep. I replied that I'm opposed to caging wild animals. Gerry looked at me, bug-eyed and gasped, 'That's a wild animal?'
Ehu M. McBee
Brewster, New York
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In February 1987, the real thing happened. A star much larger and much hotter than our sun reached the end of its conventional life. In its core, hydrogen in quantities equal to about six times the mass of the sun had been converted to helium in hellish thermonuclear reactions. Helium in turn had fused into carbon and oxygen, which themselves fused into even heavier elements. Eventually the innermost section of the core, about half again as massive as the sun, was turned into almost pure iron. The star was running out of available reactions, and activity in the core slackened. Now the radiation pouring outward was no longer as strong as the gravitational force pulling inward; the star collapsed, falling inward on itself until it could give no more, and exploded, spewing radiation and most of its mass into space. For astronomers, the supernova (known as Supernova 1987A, or SN1987A for short) was and is the story of the century.
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Ancient Athenian navy yards kept careful lists of equipment for their trireme fleet. Those lists that survive revealed two different lengths of oar, 13 feet and 13 feet 10 inches, the shorter being used toward the narrow bow and stern of the vessel. Aristotle compared their splayed-out pattern to the fingers of the hand. From Athenian accounts it is clear that a trireme was not for positioning alongside other craft for boarding and capture, in the style of Hollywood sea battles. It was a fast seaborne missile, its ramming beak, reinforced with bronze, being used to hit other craft to hole and flood them. Triremes were day sailors and carried only a handful of soldiers (14 in all) with a partial deck canopy to shield the top oarsmen from sun and rain and from enemy javelins. Oarsmen customarily were free citizens. As the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides both relate, the Athenians and their allies, with a brilliant use of triremes, beat off the Persians at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. If the Greeks had lost, many ideas of government, of philosophy, of culture taken for granted today would have died with them.
