DANJUMA MERCY

Eternal flame

Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin eternal flame memorializing losses during World War Two.An eternal flame is a flame, lamp or torch that burns continuously for an indefinite period. Most eternal flames are ignited and tended intentionally, but some are natural phenomena caused by natural gas leaks, peat fires and coal seam fires, all of which can be initially ignited by lightning, piezoelectricity or human activity, and all of which can burn for decades or centuries.

In ancient times, human-tended eternal flames were fueled by wood or olive oil; modern examples usually use a piped supply of propane or natural gas. Eternal flames most often commemorate a person or event of national significance, or serve as a reminder of commitment to a common goal, such as international peace.

Religious and cultural significance

The eternal fire is a long-standing tradition in many cultures and religions. In ancient Iran the atar was tended by a dedicated priest and represented the concept of "divine sparks" or amesha spenta, as understood in Zoroastrianism. Period sources indicate that three "great fires" existed in the Achaemenid era of Persian history, which are collectively considered the earliest reference to the practice of creating ever-burning community fires. The eternal flame was a component of the Jewish religious rituals performed in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple in Jerusalem, where a commandment required a fire to burn continuously upon the Outer Altar.^[2] Modern Judaism continues a similar tradition by having a sanctuary lamp, the ner tamid, always lit above the ark in the synagogue. After World War II, such flames gained meaning as a reminder of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.

The Cherokee Nation maintained a fire at the seat of government until ousted by the Indian Removal Act in 1830. At that time, embers from the last great council fire were carried west to the nation's new home in the Oklahoma Territory. The flame, maintained in Oklahoma, was carried back to the last seat of the Cherokee government at Red Clay State Park in south-eastern Tennessee, to the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, North Carolina, and to the Cherokee Nation Tribal Complex in Talequah, Oklahoma. In China, it has at times been common to establish an eternally lit lamp as a visible aspect of ancestor veneration; it is set in front of a spirit tablet on the family's ancestral altar.

The eternal flame commemorating American President John F. Kennedy after his assassination in 1963 is believed to be the first such memorial to honor a single, known individual (as opposed to flames commemorating one or more unknown soldiers).^{[citation needed]} In the wake of the Kennedy memorial, eternal flames have been used throughout the world to honor persons of national or international significance.

The man on the Clapham omnibus

The man on the Clapham omnibus is a hypothetical reasonable person, used by the courts in English law where it is necessary to decide whether a party has acted as a reasonable person would — for example, in a civil action for negligence. The man on the Clapham omnibus is a reasonably educated and intelligent but nondescript person, against whom the defendant's conduct can be measured.

The term was introduced into English law during the Victorian era, and is still an important concept in British law. It is also used in other Commonwealth common law jurisdictions, sometimes with suitable modifications to the phrase as an aid to local comprehension. The route of the original "Clapham omnibus" is unknown but London Buses route 88 was briefly branded as "the Clapham Omnibus" in the 1990s and is sometimes associated with the term.

History

The phrase was first put to legal use in a reported judgement by Sir Richard Henn Collins MR in the 1903 English Court of Appeal libel case, McQuire v. Western Morning News. He attributed it to Lord Bowen, said to have coined it as junior counsel defending the Tichborne Claimant case in 1871. Brewer's also lists this as a possible first use.

It may be derived from the phrase "Public opinion ... is the opinion of the bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus a description by the 19th-century journalist Walter Bagehot of a normal London man. Clapham, in South London, was at the time a nondescript commuter suburb seen to represent "ordinary" London. Omnibus is now a rather archaic term for a public bus, but was in common use by the judiciary at the beginning of the 20th century.

The concept was used by Greer LJ in the case of Hall v. Brooklands Auto-Racing Club (1933) to define the standard of care a defendant must live up to in order to avoid being found negligent.

The use of the phrase was reviewed by the UK Supreme Court on appeal in the of case of Healthcare at Home Limited v. The Common Services Agency UKSC 49, in paragraphs 1 to 4

1. The Clapham omnibus has many passengers. The most venerable is the reasonable man, who was born during the reign of Victoria but remains in vigorous health. Amongst the other passengers are the right-thinking member of society, familiar from the law of defamation, the officious bystander, the reasonable parent, the reasonable landlord, and the fair-minded and informed observer, all of whom have had season tickets for many years.

2. The horse-drawn bus between Knightsbridge and Clapham, which Lord Bowen is thought to have had in mind, was real enough. But its most famous passenger, and the others I have mentioned, are legal fictions. They belong to an intellectual tradition of defining a legal standard by reference to a hypothetical person, which stretches back to the creation by Roman jurists of the figure of the bonus paterfamilias...

3. It follows from the nature of the reasonable man, as a means of describing a standard applied by the court, that it would be misconceived for a party to seek to lead evidence from actual passengers on the Clapham omnibus as to how they would have acted in a given situation or what they would have foreseen, in order to establish how the reasonable man would have acted or what he would have foreseen. Even if the party offered to prove that his witnesses were reasonable men, the evidence would be beside the point. The behaviour of the reasonable man is not established by the evidence of witnesses, but by the application of a legal standard by the court. The court may require to be informed by evidence of circumstances which bear on its application of the standard of the reasonable man in any particular case; but it is then for the court to determine the outcome, in those circumstances, of applying that impersonal standard.

4. In recent times, some additional passengers from the European Union have boarded the Clapham omnibus. This appeal is concerned with one of them: the reasonably well-informed and normally diligent tenderer.

My father, my hero

His name was Sigmund John Dilenschneider, otherwise known as "Dil." He was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the son of a weaver.
He grew up with virtually no money. When his friends went to college, he went to work and saved what he could. 
He didn't get to college until he was well into his twenties, years after his friends had moved on to other things.
He graduated from the Wharton School in Philadelphia, where he met my mother. But this was in the midst of the Depression, and money was tight. Even after they got married, they couldn't live together because he couldn't afford an apartment.
Finally my dad got a job at a newspaper and his career began. He worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Bulletin. 
Then he moved to New York and got a job with Scripps-Howard. He ended up in Ohio, working for the Cleveland Press and finally the Columbus Citizen. 
That's where he was when the story I'm about to tell took place. I was very young at the time, but I remember it well.
It began when the phone rang. To my surprise, my dad took the call in the basement. 
Unbeknownst to him, I was huddled beneath the basement steps in a favorite hiding spot of mine, listening to the whole thing. 
I don't know how much I understood at the time, but I'll never forget the drama and tension surrounding the whole event. 
Later on, my parents filled me in on the details.
The call came from a local department store called Cousins & Fern. Cousins & Fern was then a major retailer in Columbus, Ohio. Its advertising support kept the paper alive. But they had a problem: The store's CEO or founder, I don't remember which, had just committed suicide. The person on the phone wanted my dad to keep the story out of the paper.
My dad said he couldn't do that. He promised to present the story respectfully and not trumpet it across the first page. But they had to treat it as news, he said, because it was important. He reiterated that point a couple of times. A long silence followed. It turned out the guy on the other end of the phone had threatened to withdraw all the Cousins & Fern advertising if my dad published the story.
This could easily have destroyed the paper. But my dad didn't flinch. He said, "I'm sorry, I've got to do it, and I hope you'll be able to understand why I've got to do it, and I hope we'll retain your advertising." Then he hung up and went upstairs. I followed.
The next day, two things happened. The story ran in the paper, just as my father had said it would. And Cousins & Fern withdrew all of its advertising.
Freedom of speech wasn't a meaningless phrase to my father. A newspaperman through and through, he wasn't willing to compromise on that. To this day, I am tremendously proud that he took that stance.
Fortunately, he didn't have to pay the consequences, though he was willing to. 
Two or three days later, a guy named Fred Lazarus, the founder of the Federated Department Store chain, called my father and asked him to come over to his office. My dad went. 
As he told the story, he and Fred Lazarus sat on an elegant French couch and sipped demitasse coffee from delicate China cups. Fred Lazarus said he was surprised that Cousins  & Fern had decided not to advertise in the paper any longer. That meant Lazarus could increase his own advertising commitment to the paper. In fact, he said, he wanted to put Cousins & Fern out of business. 
Which is precisely what happened. Lazarus doubled his advertising commitment; my dad's paper was safe; Cousins & Fern folded; and Lazarus went on to become Federated.

Wow! signal

The Wow! signal was a strong narrowband radio signal detected by Jerry R. Ehman on August 15, 1977, while he was working on a SETI project at the Big Ear radio telescope of The Ohio State University, then located at Ohio Wesleyan University's Perkins Observatory in Delaware, Ohio. The signal bore the expected hallmarks of non-terrestrial and non-Solar System origin. The signal appears to have come from the northwest of the globular cluster of M55 in the constellation Sagittarius, near the Chi Sagittarii star group.

The entire signal sequence lasted for the full 72-second window that Big Ear was able to observe it, but has not been detected again. The signal has been the subject of significant media attention, and astronomers have tried many times in vain to find the signal again. Impressed by the relative resemblance of the expected signature of an interstellar signal in the antenna used, Ehman circled the signal on the computer printout and wrote the comment "Wow!" on its side, which became the name of the signal itself.

Background

The Wow! signal was detected by Jerry R. Ehman on August 15, 1977, who was working on a SETI project at the now-defunct Big Ear radio telescope of The Ohio State University The telescope was then located at Ohio Wesleyan University's Perkins Observatory in Delaware, Ohio, when Ehman spotted a surprising vertical column with the alphanumerical sequence “6EQUJ5,” which had occurred at 10:16 p.m. EST. He took a red marker to write "Wow!" in the margin of the printout and encircled the alphanumeric code "6EQUJ5

BY:

DANJUMA MERCY

KUW/U14/MCM/2011

MASS COMMUNICATION