Danskcolin: Sunday March 20th 2022

09:00 By the skin of our teeth, Lois and I manage to roll out of bed and be sitting down in front of our new laptop in time for our weekend zoom call with Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia.

flashback to May 2016: Lois and I visit our daughter Sarah

in Perth for the first time since the family emigrated in 2015

Unfortunately there's a technical problem with the zoom call this time - we think it's at Sarah's end - we can see her but we can't hear her. Sarah switches us to a whatsapp audio call, which is okay, though it's a pity we can't see our 8-year old twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica. Never mind, next Sunday perhaps!

Lots of news. The twins have been making smoothies today, whatever that is - Lois knows! And they have stacks of lemon trees in their garden apparently - too many to harvest all at the same time, so Lois advises "juicing" them and freezing them. Makes sense to me !!!

[Historical note: I think most Australians have trouble deciding what to do with their "lemon mountains" - "produce mountains" of various kinds were originally popularised by Jean Monnet and the EEC's so-called "Founding Fathers".]

The family had a good time yesterday on their 18 ft boat, the Rioja, and Sarah says every time they go out on the water - the Swan River - she feels more at home, and feels she has learnt to do more and more of the onboard work. It takes up a full day, however, with all the preparation beforehand and all the work afterwards to stow everything away, including the sails, in the car and trailer..

Usually the wind is from the west, off the Indian Ocean, but yesterday it was blowing in the opposite direction - off the shore, so it was really difficult, both to get back to the landing stage: they needed to "tack", of course. And then it was difficult again to get the boat out of the water and back onto the trailer. My god!!!!

the family's 18 ft boat, the Rioja

The Swan River is normally a very crowded waterway at weekends, but Sarah says she's getting more familiar with working out who's got right of way.

The twins too are getting more used to being on the water, and they spend much more time on deck than they did to begin with. I can imagine how scary it would have been for them at the start.

State premier Mark McGowan has announced that Western Australia is dropping most of its COVID restrictions now. The twins have had their 2nd jab, and will be returning to school tomorrow after a 2-week absence, due to a class friend contracting the virus - the twins didn't catch it luckily. They're going to wear masks at school because you're less likely to be told to stay off school if you were wearing a mask when another pupil tests positive.

The state premier, Mark McGowan, has announced the dropping of

many of the state's former coronavirus restrictions.

The family are still hoping to move back to the UK, possibly later this year, and Sarah has an appointment with a mortgage advisor next week. She works as an accountant and gets a higher salary over there than would be the case with an equivalent job in the UK, which could be a plus if she applies on the basis of her current job.

Fascinating stuff !!!!!

And Lois and I have got to play our part by selling our house, which we bought 36 years ago, and then downsizing to a smaller one, probably in Hampshire, where we can be nearer to our daughters: Alison in Headley and Sarah, who will hopefully be moving to the neighbouring county of Dorset.

However, our house has several major defects, that Lois and I have learned to live with - although we don't think a purchaser would be so happy to have to live with. Oh dear! We're currently trying to smarten it up a bit.

14:30 I take a nap and when I wake up, I see that Lois has cleared out one end of the larder, ready for our friendly local handyman, Stephen, who is coming tomorrow to make the larder look like it isn't a piece of the Third World - my god !!!!!

the freshly emptied so-called "south end" of our larder

while I've been taking a nap, Lois has cleared out one end of our larder,

moving a bunch of stuff into the utility room, including all our home-made jams,

so that Stephen, our friendly local handyman, can make it

look as if it isn't a part of the Third World - my god !!!!!!!

15:00 Steve, our American brother-in-law, has sent me an interesting map illustrating the word for "war" in several European languages, and the historical origins of these words.

I become so fascinated by the etymological information in the left-hand panel that I don't spot initially what presumably is the main aim of the map's originator - to suggest that the word for "war" in Russian is something unrelated to all the other European countries' words.

Oh dear, Putin won't like that, that's for sure !!!!

Yes, apparently the word for "war" in Russian translates literally to "special operation".

Sorry, Vladimir - somebody has "rumbled" you haha !!!!!

20:00 We watch some TV, an interesting documentary on the PBS America channel on the female half of the married couple who were the founders of US cryptography and cryptanalysis, Elizebeth and William Friedman.

It's no surprise that in the 19th century the US had had no need to develop a governmental code-breaking agency - why would they? And so when the US entered World War I in 1917, the US Army were starting almost from scratch.

But not entirely from scratch, because of 2 young people, the Quaker Elizebeth Smith and Russian Jewish immigrant William Friedman. The couple had first cut their teeth on code-breaking trying unsuccessfully to prove millionaire businessman George Fabyan's pet theory that the works of Shakespeare were actually written by his philosopher friend Francis Bacon.

They quickly disproved George Fabyan's theory that Bacon had inserted coded messages into a 1627 folio using a kind of binary code to alter the fonts and send out a message to the world.

What a crazy theory, George!

It was fortunate for the Allies, however, because Elizebeth and William fell in love working on the folios: they married in 1917, and between them they kickstarted US codebreaking.

the young couple, Elizebeth Smith and William Friedman,

and the desk (and the Shakespeare folio) over which they fell in love

The early years of their marriage mirrors the start of US codebreaking. Together they led the first ever US military unit dedicated to the science.

And in an interesting group photo of the unit we see reflected the couple's total fascination for code-breaking: they got their military recruits to send out a message in a Francis-Bacon-style-binary code: some cadets were facing the camera and others were looking to the side, spelling out a binary-coded message that decrypts to "KNOWLEDGE IS POWER" !

part of a group photo of Elizebeth and William's pioneering US Army

codebreaking unit, the men have been posed to spell out a coded message

to the world, which is clever!

There's so much stupidity and humourlessness in the world - isn't it nice to be able to look back and see some intelligence and humour staring back at you from photos of the distant past? Well, I think so, anyway! Call me a romantic fool if you like haha! [All right I will ! - Ed]

It's no surprise that Elizebeth faced a lot of sexism in her career, getting paid half her husband William's salary, for example, and having to work as an assistant to men who were less capable than her, and all that sort of thing. Lois herself has suffered from that kind of thing in her career, and she comments "Tell me something new!" haha!

After World War I, Elizebeth worked on coded traffic from liquor smugglers and gangsters in the Prohibition Era, eventually leading to successful court cases against the ringleaders responsible. She testified in the resulting court cases and became a national celebrity - the papers called her "the pretty woman who protects the United States".

All in all, the reports don't talk so much about her brains, her ability to break these codes and bring these gangsters to justice, they talk more about how she looks, how she's dressed, and that she's this dainty little woman who is bringing these big Al Capone-type mobsters to justice.

What madness !!!!!

Then Pearl Harbour came, and Elizebeth was called on to head the Government's codebreaking efforts against the Japanese Navy. However the Navy had a rule whereby women couldn't be in charge of men, so she was made deputy to a man who was a far less skilled cryptanalyst.

And who knew that South America at that time was so much affected by German immigration dating back to the early 20th century? Areas with whole German towns, German street-names, German newspapers, German schools. What madness !!!

And who knew ? [I expect a lot of people knew that! - Ed]

Elizebeth's unit was soon being charged with monitoring communications between a Nazi spy ring in South America and the German high command. And when she started breaking the spy ring's ciphers she discovered that the spies, led by the mysterious guy codenamed Sargo (real name Johannes Siegfried Becker) were supplying German U-boats with information about allied merchant shipping travelling across the Atlantic.

And who knew that J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, compromised the codebreakers' efforts by stepping in too early to have some of the spies arrested by South American police forces, an operation which led the the remaining spies to strengthen their ciphers? After that major blunder by Hoover, Elizebeth and her unit were more or less forced to start again from scratch - what madness !!!

That wasn't Hoover's last intervention in the story, however. After it was all over, he got hold of the decrypts Elizebeth and her team had produced, and stamped them all ith an FBI identity number - thus claiming the triumph for himself and his agency. What madness (again) !!!!!

Elizebeth's work on South American communications was a testament to the power of code-breaking, but it was a private and lonely victory. She had signed a navy oath promising her silence until death. She couldn't tell anybody outside her unit, not even her husband William, who was working on codebreaking efforts elsewhere. And she could do nothing when Hoover took the credit.