Magic Statistics

In the final song on his Grammy Award-winning 1997 release, Time Out of Mind, Bob Dylan sang,

Well my heart's in the Highlands wherever I roam
That's where I'll be when I get called home
The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme
Well my heart's in the Highland,
I can only get there one step at a time.

True words indeed, for now he’s bought a £2 million home in the Cairngorms Mountains of the Highlands.  (The Cairngorms area is shown on map at right.)

The notoriously reclusive American star and his brother David have bought Aultmore House in the foothills of the Cairngorms.

The house was built at the turn of the 20th century for the millionaire owner of a department store in Moscow and has been described as one of the finest homes in the Highlands.
. . .
The brothers bought the property under the family name of Zimmerman. They are said to have spent some time there but Dylan has not been seen in the nearby village of Nethybridge.
. . .
Dylan has often drawn on the poetry and folk music of Scotland for his songs, particularly his early work.

Dylan has revealed that his 1964 protest song, "The Times They Are A-Changin’", was based on a Scottish folk tune.

[T]he song was influenced by Hamish Henderson, the Scottish former army intelligence officer who later became a left-wing peace campaigner and poet.

The songwriter, who rarely talks about his songwriting, admitted last week that the song came from folklorist Hamish Henderson’s The 51st (Highland) Division’s Farewell to Sicily.

Dylan said: "You use what’s been handed down. The Times They Are A-Changin’ is from an old Scottish folk song."

Dylan also indicated his love for Scotland by accepting an honorary doctorate of music from St Andrews University in 2004, one of only two he has accepted.  (The other was from Princeton in 1970.)

He is known to be an avid golfer, so he may apply for membership at the local Abernethy golf club.  The club’s treasurer insists he will receive no special consideration, however.

Jack McCool, the treasurer, said: "Mr Dylan would have to apply in writing just like everyone else and be vetted by the committee.

"If there were no objections then he would be a member after paying the membership fee, which at present is £105."

The singer may stay at his new digs, shown below, when he plays Glasgow in April.

h/t for Bob Dylan and Scotland link: Expecting Rain

Previous related posts:

• The night Bob Dylan won the Oscar
• Bob Dylan: “Saved”

A hotel in Greater Manchester, England, was recently awarded the bottom prize in the annual TripAdvisor.com Traveller’s Choice hotel awards for Britain.  A very enterprising reporter named Nigel Bunyan apparently viewed that as a challenge, for he promptly checked in to see if it’s really as bad as all that.

His verdict?  His room “was not the complete nightmare one might have imagined”.  Now, there’s a ringing endorsement.

A hotel in Greater Manchester has been accused of being the dirtiest in Britain in a survey of tourists from around the world.

The Britannia Hotel in Stockport was called "absolutely disgusting" and "a dump" by some visitors while others claimed to have found a plughole full of hair and cobwebs on the ceiling in their rooms.

All but three of the 43 people who reviewed the hotel for website tripadvisor.com gave it the lowest possible rating.

Maybe I'm mellowing, or maybe I'm just not as picky as I once was, but having seen the Britannia Hotel Stockport, I had expected far worse of Room 308. 

Mr Bunyan says he’s stayed in worse hotels.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t name them.

I know TripAdvisor.com well, for I made extensive use of the site in planning our two-month visit to Great Britain in summer 2004.  Generally speaking, I found it informative and very helpful, so I recommend the site for travellers.

The TripAdvisor pages (here and here) with reviews of the award-winning Britannia Hotel Stockport are riotously funny.  Only three of 45 reviewers (two more have chimed in since Mr Bunyan wrote his article) give this dive dump hole establishment a rating above the absolute minimum of one and, based on the comments, the visitor who rated it a five really meant to give it a one.  Here are a few sample headlines:

• “Holiday from hell”
• “Disgusting”
• “Don’t stay even if you are desperate”
• “Seriously - Don’t do it”
• "Total Dump, Dirty, Unfriendly staff, worst hotel ever - Stay away !!"
• “Just appalling”
• “For the love of God stay away”
• “The Fleapit”
• “Don’t go there!”
• "Awful!!!!" [gotta love those exclamation points]
• "A Rancid Dump"
• "Whatever you do - Stay somewhere else!"
• "Don't stay here even if they pay you"

Well, you get the idea.

The hotel’s website is here.  (Caution: Several TripAdvisor reviewers warn not to be fooled by the attractive pictures.)  Room prices range from £39 for a single to £49 for a family room.  For UK hotels, that’s dirt cheap (sorry).  Our cheapest B&B cost more.

Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, who was arrested in November, went on trial yesterday because of his writings on the internet.  He is charged with insulting Islam, damaging national unity, inciting sedition, and insulting President Hosni Mubarak.  If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of nine years in prison.

Kareem Nabil has been held in solitary confinement and forbidden visits from his family or his lawyer.  Although Egyptian police have detained and beaten bloggers in the past, he is the first to go on trial over his blog postings.

He appears to a victim of shifting political circumstances.

Nabil's trial in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria began two days after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Mubarak, seeking support for a new American strategy on calming violence in Iraq.

But unlike past visits to Egypt when she pressed demands for greater democracy, Rice made no reference to reform, instead praising the two countries' "important strategic relationship — one that we value greatly."

In 2005, the Bush administration made Egypt — which Mubarak has ruled unquestioned for a quarter century — the centerpiece of what it called a policy priority of promoting democratic change in the Arab world.

But Egyptian reformists say Washington has all but dropped its pressure on Mubarak amid the Bush administration's need for support on Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A website dedicated to his case has been set up here.  Kareem’s own blog, in Arabic, is here.

h/t: Religion News Blog

Previous related posts:

• Egyptian blogger arrested for insulting Islam
• Egyptian blogger Kareem Suleiman still in detention
• Egyptian blogger beaten, jailed

Canadian women with ancestral roots in the Punjab region of India appear to be having fewer baby girls than the Canadian average.  Data from the 2001 Census show that, in the South Asian communities of Brampton and Mississauga (suburbs of Toronto), the proportion of girls under 15 is two percentage points below that of others residing in those municipalities.

Although some disagree, many Indo-Canadians admit that sex-selection abortions are widely accepted and practiced by their ethnic group.

Anubha Dhanju says she noticed the imbalance because of an innocent comment by her son. "My son came home one afternoon and wondered why girls don't go to school," she says.

Ms. Dhanju, a teacher in Mississauga, says her son had noticed there were few girls of Indian origin in his class at Roberta Bondar Public School, located in a part of Brampton where many immigrants from India have made a home.
. . .
"We kill our girls in the womb, even before they are born," says Amandeep Kaur, a consultant with the Mississauga-based Punjabi Community Health Centre. "It's sad, but the truth."
. . .
But officials with the Peel District School Board, which oversees schools in Brampton and Mississauga, disagree that there is an issue. "We have not observed this," says Varsha Naik, a community liaison co-ordinator for the Peel board, although she acknowledges that "certain communities from South Asia still continue to put greater value in having a male child."

Since the introduction of ultrasound technology to India in the early 1990s, births of girls have fallen far behind those of boys in India as a whole—and especially so in the Punjab state of north India, where girls are viewed as a burden by the family.

Indo-Canadian women report being coerced in aborting unborn baby girls.  So much for "women's freedom of choice".  Where are the feminists who fancy themselves defenders of Canadian women?

As long as multiculturalism remains Canadian policy, it’s doubtful anything will be done to protect Indo-Canadian women from being pressured into having abortions they don’t really want.

Previous related posts:

• Global war against baby girls
• Repeat abortions trivialise pregnancy
• Sex-selection abortions occurring in Canada

With a total fertility rate of only 1.5, well below replacement level of 2.1, Canada’s population will begin to decrease rapidly before mid-century—and Canada is in this respect by no means unique among industrialised nations.  A recent report by OECD brings a sobering message.

In a 2003 report on fertility rates in 30 democratic wealthy countries, the OECD asserts: "The current levels of fertility imply that the populations of [all these] countries will shrink to about one-third of today's levels in about one century." This implies a Canadian population of 12 million in 2100, marginally more than the population recorded by the census of 1931.

The OECD report puts the average fertility rate of these 30 countries at 1.6, which is higher by 0.1 than Canada's rate — where a fertility loss of 0.1 equals a million and a half lost people per generation. It warns of "a sharp reduction in the populations of all OECD countries in the near future." It warns that these countries will produce slower rates of economic growth, will grow relatively poorer as they grow absolutely smaller.

Canada’s population implosion will be accompanied by a ballooning of the proportion of elderly people.  Those oldsters will be dependent on government for their support, i.e., on productively employed Canadians.

Admitting more immigrants from high-fertility countries may delay, but it will not prevent, onset of population decline.  For, as Globe and Mail columnist Neil Reynolds points out, minority women in Western countries also have low fertility rates.

The fertility rates of immigrant women quickly approach the Canadian average. Fertility rates for other visible-minority women in Canada: Chinese, 1.2; Latin American, 1.8; black, 1.7; Japanese, 1.1; Korean: 1.3. The average: 1.4 — lower even than the all-Canadian rate.

Among Canadian minorities, only Arab women have a fertility rate above replacement level.

Of all democratic countries, only three—the United States, Iceland, and New Zealand—have fertility rates at or above replacement.

See also Neil Reynolds’s column of 17 January, “What are the implications of zero fertility?”

Previous related posts:

• Canada’s fertility deficit
• Canada’s fertility rate still below replacement
• Canadian population rapidly aging