News You Can Use: "...Budapest Had a Smile Club to Stop People from Killing Themselves in the 1930s"

Have you waited too long to get that private compound hidey hole in order?
Not to worry, bunky. From Vintage Everyday:

 “In the Smile School of Budapest, a woman looks at herself in the mirror with a grim bandage on her face.” Het Leven, 1937.

An epidemic of suicide sweeps through Budapest, and the city tries to stop it in an odd way: by creating a “Smile Club”, where people are taught to smile again. The initiative is covered in the 17 October 1937 issue of Sunday Times Perth:

“CITY OF SUICIDES BECOMES CITY OF SMILES

Budapest, Saturday

Although a magnet for tourists from all over the world, Budapest has for several years been known to its own people as The City of Suicides.

Budapest suffered badly after the war and has received unpleasant publicity from the number of cases of self-destruction occurring every year within its boundaries. Some of them are alleged to have been inspired by the Budapest song, “Gloomy Sunday”, but, be that as it may, the suicide rate in Budapest is definitively very high.

The favorite method adopted by most Budapest melancholics is drowning, and patrol boats are stationed along the boundary near the bridges to rescue citizens who seek consolation in the dark waters of the Danube.

Now, however, a “Smile Club” has been inaugurated to counteract the suicide craze. It was originally began more as a joke by a Professor Jeno and a hypnotist named Binczo, but somehow it caught on. The organisers have now a regular school and guarantee to teach the Roosevelt smile, the Mona Lisa smile, the Clark Gable smile, the Dick Powell smile, the Loretta Young smile, and various other types, the rates varying according to the difficulties encountered.

Jeno says the methods employed at his school, aided by better business conditions in Budapest, are making smiling popular, and before long it is hoped that the name of Budapest will be change to the City of Smiles.”

“In the Smile School of Budapest, a woman looks at the smiling woman’s faces held in front of her. On the wall, two smiles and the picture of Mona Lisa.” Het Leven, 1937.

Gloomy Sunday, the popular 1933 hit of Rezső Seress was in fact propagated by the press as “the Suicide Song” or simply “the Killer Song” in more than a hundred languages all over the world, claiming that dozens, or even hundreds of people committed suicide because of it....MUCH MORE

Commodities Collapse

Some quick hits, we'll be back with more later today:

Corn down 4.72% at $3.43

FinViz

Gasoline down 4.4% at 1.4469

FinViz

Natural Gas down 6.66% at $2.7880

FinViz

"A Few Useful Mental Tools from Richard Feynman"

From Farnam Street:

We’ve covered the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman many times here before. He was a genius. A true genius. But there have been many geniuses — physics has been fortunate to attract some of them — and few of them are as well known as Feynman. Why is Feynman so well known? It’s likely because he had tremendous range outside of pure science, and although he won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum mechanics, he’s probably best known for other things, primarily his wonderful ability to explain and teach.

This ability was on display in a series of non-technical lectures in 1963, memorialized in a short book called The Meaning of it All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist. The lectures are a wonderful example of how well Feynman’s brain worked outside of physics, talking through basic reasoning and some of the problems of his day.

Particularly useful are a series of “tricks of the trade” he gives in a section called This Unscientific Age. These tricks show Feynman taking the method of thought he learned in pure science and applying it to the more mundane topics most of us have to deal with every day. They’re wonderfully instructive. Let’s check them out.

***

Before we start, it’s worth noting that Feynman takes pains to mention that not everything needs to be considered with scientific accuracy. So don’t waste your time unless it’s a scientific matter. So let’s start with a deep breath:

Now, that there are unscientific things is not my grief. That’s a nice word. I mean, that is not what I am worrying about, that there are unscientific things. That something is unscientific is not bad; there is nothing the matter with it. It is just unscientific. And scientific is limited, of course, to those things that we can tell about by trial and error. For example, there is the absurdity of the young these days chanting things about purple people eaters and hound dogs, something that we cannot criticize at all if we belong to the old flat foot floogie and a floy floy or the music goes down and around. Sons of mothers who sang about “come, Josephine, in my flying machine,” which sounds just about as modern as “I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China.” So in life, in gaiety, in emotion, in human pleasures and pursuits, and in literature and so on, there is no need to be scientific, there is no reason to be scientific. One must relax and enjoy life. That is not the criticism. That is not the point.

As we enter the realm of “knowable” things in a scientific sense, the first trick has to do with deciding whether someone truly knows their stuff or is mimicking:

The first one has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions—that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions—then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn’t know the answer, if he is an honest man. It is important to appreciate that.

And I think that I can illustrate one unscientific aspect of the world which would be probably very much better if it were more scientific. It has to do with politics. Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, “What are you going to do about the farm question?” And he knows right away— bang, bang, bang.

Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. “What are you going to do about the farm problem?” “Well, I don’t know. I used to be a general, and I don’t know anything about farming. But it seems to me it must be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say that they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way that I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it, and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it. Now, I can’t tell you ahead of time what conclusion, but I can give you some of the principles I’ll try to use—not to make things difficult for individual farmers, if there are any special problems we will have to have some way to take care of them,” etc., etc., etc.

That’s a wonderfully useful way to figure out whether someone is Max Planck or the chaffeur.

The second trick regards how to deal with uncertainty:...MUCH MORE

Some of our previous visits with Feynman:

Bill Gates On Richard Feynman: "The Best Teacher I Never Had"
Gates Puts Feynman Lectures Online
"Richard Feynman on the Social Sciences"
Thinking About Science

For guidance I often seek out a bongo drummer-slash-raconteur.
We post this once a year, usually around Nobel Prize time.
Here's the musician riffing on science...

Gates Puts Feynman Lectures Online
To Celebrate Today's Award of the Nobel Prize in Physics Here are Twenty Physics Jokes
Economists and Econophysics
3-D Printing and Nano and Robots, Oh My
"Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields"
How to Tell Crazy From Brainpower Intensive
Richard Feynman: "THE RELATION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION"

Here are Feynmann's Nobel Lecture and banquet speech.

More interesting, I think, is his 1974 Caltech commencement address.

See also:
How to Tell Crazy From Brainpower Intensive

Aston Martin Live Unveiling--UPDATED

Here's the Periscope link.

-from Motoring Research

Earlier:
"Aston Martin and Red Bull AM-RB 001 Hypercar Due Today"

Aanschouw: de Aston Martin AM-RB 001. Atmosferisch V12, pic.twitter.com/rBWmG6aS8K

— Roy Kleijwegt (@roykleijwegt) July 5, 2016

Commodities: 'Era of high ag prices quite likely over' - OECD, UN report

Gosh, I don't know. We're bearish, have been, unabashedly and out in public for what seems a long time but that is quite a statement.*
On the other hand, wheat prices collapsed (again), down 16.25 cents (3.65%) to hit generational lows:

FinViz

From Agrimoney:

The period of high ag commodity prices is "quite likely over", sapped by a slowdown in population growth, the OECD and United Nations said - although milk powder, ethanol and soymeal values look poised to outperform.

The drop in agricultural commodity prices last year – when the sector offered negative returns of 15.6%, taking three-year losses to 34%, according to Bcom indices – highlighted a structural shift in value prospects.

"Prices for the main crops, livestock and fish products all fell in 2015, signalling that an era of high prices is quite likely over for all sub-sectors," according to a report from the OECD and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.

The downturn reflected factors including "several years of robust supply growth, weakening demand growth… lower oil prices and further accumulation of already abundant stocks".

And prices look set, over the next decade to "remain below recent peak levels", undermined by a drop to 1% a year in the rate of world population growth, and economic slowdown in some countries, with Chinese GDP seen expanding by 6% a year, down from 9% a year over the past decade.

Sugar, wheat softness

In real terms, ie stripping out the impact of general inflation, the performance will be even worse, with prices of many agricultural commodities declining over the next decade....MORE

*Way back in January 2009's "Corn Prices May Enter Decade-Long Slump, Agency Says" we noted one thing among many to be aware of:

Watch that Pacific Decadal Oscillation. A New York Times archive search for the term "crop failure" returns 1950 hits, with a preponderance of stories written during the cool phase of the PDO. With the interconnectedness of the world's grain markets, a failure anywhere would raise prices everywhere....

That post also linked to  May '08's:

A Black Swan in Food

...Donald Coxe, chief strategist of Harris Investment Management and one of my favorite analysts, spoke at my recent Strategic Investment Conference. He shared a statistic that has given me pause for concern as I watch food prices shoot up all over the world.

North America has experienced great weather for the last 18 consecutive years, which, combined with other improvements in agriculture, has resulted in abundant crops. According to Don, you have to go back 800 years to find a period of such favorable weather for so long a time....

So we're now up to 26 consecutive years without a major weather problem in the U.S. and with only (relatively) minor disruptions in the rest of the world over that time. Knock wood.

Regulatory Capture, Ancient and Modern

From RegBlog:

Until recently, the term regulatory capture seemed stale, a mid-20th century academic construct incapable of describing the latest manifestations of special interest influence. At the opportune time, new empirical work by academics, featured in Daniel Carpenter’s and David Moss’s book Preventing Regulatory Capture, refines the concept to discern and measure capture more accurately, and, in that matter, engender plausible, contextual solutions. Many of the novel forms capture now takes and the projected remedies, are covered in the essays in this RegBlog series. At this point, a brief history of the concept of capture, in particular its antecedents in political thought, may inform, if not entertain.

It is possible to find the provenance of regulatory capture in classical republican thought. Slinking alongside the self-sacrificing virtue needed to sustain the political community was the concept of corruption. Corruption, of course, is a vague pejorative encompassing everything from graft to moral depravity. There is, however, a particular historical use of the term that contains the key element of capture, specifically the concern that private interests are intruding in the public sphere—a boundary has been crossed. In earliest incarnations, we find it in the classical anxiety over the tyrant, who swallows government entirely, depriving citizens of access to the public realm and the chance to participate in political affairs. For Plato, this confinement to the private sphere of the domestic was the most baleful and dehumanizing effect of tyrannical government. By way of a gloss, Aristotle added that the tyrant reduces to his own personal self-interest the common good, which rightly is the product of shared deliberation in assemblies.

The Roman Constitution, which was unwritten, devised a solution for tyranny into which the Greek republics invariably descended. As described by the Greek historian Polybius, mixed government combined the rule of the one (monarchy), the few (aristocracy), and the many (democracy), by providing each caste with its own governmental institutions, which zealously guarded their prerogatives. Patricians composed the senate and the consulate, while the plebians had the tribunate and the assemblies. Delayed rather than defeated, tyranny reappeared, but its path charted a more sophisticated course as chronicled by Cicero and Sallust. The late Roman republicans honed in on a specific type of corruption: as Rome expanded, the private financial interests of the patrician class became parasitic on the government, through acquiring, at cutthroat prices, land conquered by Roman legions that should have been distributed to plebians. The civil wars ensued and ensured the rise of Caesar.

The next phase in the evolution of capture came in the precocious city-states of Renaissance Italy. In Venice, Milan, and especially Florence, many of the recognizable accoutrements of the modern state appeared: centralized administrative bureaucracies and complex commercial economies. The Florentine Republic, in particular, struggled to be both broadly participatory, by standards of the time, and effective. Over the course of the 15th century, governmental decision-making, though ostensibly open to all citizens selected to take part in various government councils through sortition (rapid rotation in office prevented any one citizen from accumulating too much power), was increasingly confined to a small elite of great merchants and bankers. Foremost among them were the Medici, the bankers who, according to Italian diplomat and political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, acquired outsized political power via private means—essentially through an extensive network of loans and private favors—to win partisans, who would in turn serve in public office so that the Medici need never serve. So successful was this subversion of state that Lorenzo de Medici, while a private citizen, was given free rein to negotiate treaties with foreign powers. More relevant to our purposes, Lorenzo was granted special tax concessions in 1482 “to preserve the public interest by preserving Lorenzo,” the official documents intoned.

Solutions were offered. Machiavelli was an early proponent of transparency. Francesco Guicciardini, a historian and statesman, suggested shoving the grandi into a powerful senate, in the faint hope that blatant oligarchy might rise to aristocracy given the chance. States, as we all know, can go backwards rather than forwards. What was a dynamic, prosperous city-state, weakened by incessant war, became a patrimonial state, the inheritance of the Medici, who suborned the machinery of state to serve their family interests and those of their courtiers. Banking and the wool industry withered. Patrimonialism may well be the culmination of capture....MORE

HT: Economist's View

UPDATED--"Aston Martin and Red Bull AM-RB 001 Hypercar Due Today"

Update:
Aston Martin Live Unveilling

About a half hour from now. So far all we have for pricing is "between £2 and £3"
From Autocar:

The Aston Martin-Red Bull hypercar was unveiled to potential owners at a private event in Monaco in May; we'll get our first look on 5 July

Aston Martin and Red Bull showed a full-sized model of their AM-RB 001 hypercar to prospective owners at last month’s Monaco Grand Prix, and it is set to make its public debut today.

The models to be shown are all clay or plastic at this stage, according to Aston Martin boss Andy Palmer, but they are “70% to 80% there in terms of appearance” and will lead to working prototypes by spring next year before the model is officially launched in the summer of 2018.

“We have a full-sized model of the surfaces as they stand, which is going through regulatory validation, so we’re checking things such as seat position, eye position and visibility,” Palmer told Autocar.

Just 99 cars will be built. The AM-RB 001 will be sold in certain markets only, according to Aston Martin design chief Marek Reichman, because “it’s difficult at that low volume to homologate all the markets in the world”.

Talking about the car’s design, Reichman described it as “incredibly pure, incredibly simple”.

He said: “Most of the customers that see it just say: ‘Wow, I didn’t expect this. Isn’t it beautiful?’ It’s uncompromised in terms of [Red Bull Racing technical chief] Adrian Newey’s capability, because he doesn’t have the FIA or Formula 1 telling him he can’t do this, and it’s uncompromised from my perspective because it’s the lowest car that’s going to exist.”...MORE

CJR: Trust, Journalism, and The Political Divide

From the Columbia Journalism Review:

Can narrative journalism overcome the political divide?

No self-respecting liberal would trust anything written on Breitbart, and every self-respecting conservative knows that The New York Times is a liberal rag controlled by people with New York values. Combine that with the echo-chamber of social media, the decline of local news, and the general political atmosphere of 2016, and you get a divided country with a divided media.

Or so goes the prevailing wisdom. But a study conducted this spring by the Columbia Journalism Review and the George T. Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism found that sometimes the content of a story matters more than its source, even to politically polarized readers.

For our study, we randomly assigned readers along the liberal-conservative spectrum to read this California Sunday Magazine feature about a plot to kill a police officer. The story appeared to have run in one of two fictional magazines: a purportedly conservative publication called The Patriot, or the The American Progressive, which we presented as a liberal magazine.

We specifically chose a story whose topic wasn’t overtly polarizing but contained enough political valence to trigger different reactions depending on where readers stood on the political spectrum. The core tension of the story is whether law enforcement entrapped two misguided but harmless malcontents or eliminated a legitimate extremist threat. We expected readers’ political views on issues like law enforcement and domestic terrorism to influence how they judged the actions of the cops and the would-be cop killers; we also anticipated their level of trust in the story would change depending on the political affiliation of the publication where it appeared.

Instead, the study found that readers were equally likely to trust the story no matter where it had been published. On average, readers of both publications and from both parties also rated the credibility of the reporter and her sources within a similar range. The results suggest that people across the political spectrum are equally likely to trust a long narrative story, regardless of whether they read it in a publication whose political leanings align with or differ from their own.

While there are several possible explanations, previous research on narrative persuasion suggests that a lengthy, compelling feature told through the eyes of a character or characters with whom we can empathize—possibly despite ourselves—may be one antidote to political polarization....MUCH MORE

Earth: A Visualization of Global Weather Conditions Forecast by Supercomputers, Updated Every Three Hours

From nullschool (about):

Well worth a click

And a second click

And a click and drag spin of the globe

I'd intended to embed this last year and it got lost, now I'll ask dubious reader to go visit.

HT: naked capitalism 

Here's the code at github if you want to embed:

https://github.com/cambecc/earth

So, Can You Write This Well?

For the next two minutes your politics and positions don't matter, this is smooth.

From OffGuardian:

Has Brexit triggered an anti-democractic “Color Revolution”?

It’s important to remember, it was never supposed to get his far.

The Prime Minister didn’t want it. The Chancellor didn’t want it. The Queen didn’t want it. The opposition didn’t want it. The President of the United States didn’t want it. JP Morgan didn’t want it. Goldman-Sachs didn’t want it. Parliament didn’t want it.

None of the heads of state of Europe wanted it. None of the banks wanted it. None of the corporate oligarchs wanted it. None of the corporations wanted it. The IMF didn’t want it. NATO didn’t want it.

JK Rowling didn’t want it. David Beckham didn’t want it. Bob Geldof didn’t want it. Eddie Izzard didn’t want it. Lily Allen didn’t want it. George Soros didn’t want it.

…and yet it happened.

Experts with scary numbers were on the BBC. Smiling pro-EU columnists snidely mocked from almost every paper. Trendy celebrities tweeted their complex political views in 140 characters or less. There were a lot hashtags. A lot of memes. Leavers were mocked and patronised. Guilted by association with a handful of clownish politicans we’re all supposed to laugh at, and the right-wing gutter press we’re all supposed to despise. All the heels wanted out, all the faces wanted in.

Marches were ignored, speeches unreported, politicians mis-quoted. Facts made up. An MP was martyred, and a movement blamed for her murder. There was a lot of name-calling, and more fear-mongering. That’s usually all it takes, to stop a movement.
…and yet it happened.

The chaos that followed – that still persists – is all the evidence you need to show just how shaken up the political establishment has become. The portraits are askew along the corridors of power. For once the term “political fallout” does not feel a dramatic metaphor. No institutional plan still stands, there is only a wasteland; pockmarked, cratered and scorched. The survivors shamble about, unsure what to say or do. Deformed. Cancerous.

A gang of ravenous Tory cockroaches tussle over the scorched bones of their leader. Sliming and biting their way to a seat of power they will hold for less than 6 months…probably. It would be amusing to watch, if it weren’t so nauseating.

A deep-rooted pocket of Blairites, a hold-out from a war long-since lost, have launched an assault on the only man left standing in the maelstrom, hoping to drag him down and take his place before he can implement the democratically ascertained will of the people.

It was never supposed to go this far. And now it must be stopped.

Let us imagine, for a short while, that this isn’t Britain. That the vote, rather than being on EU membership, was instead about leaving the OAS or joining NATO. That Jeremy Corbyn is a Bolivarian socialist or David Cameron a post-Soviet oligarch. Let’s imagine that none of this happened in a “Western democracy”, but a struggling banana republic, or a mewling new-born Balkan state. Imagine this is not here, but over there. Not us, but them.

Let us pretend this is one of those countries where these things happen.

The country’s fate was, ever so briefly, put in the hands of the people. They were being tasked with voting on an issue that could destroy trade agreements set to make many multi-national companies billions of dollars, an issue that poses a direct threat to America’s financial and Imperial interests, an issue that is an existential threat to NATO itself.

You can’t leave that to chance.

The people must be controlled. They are pressured and coerced by the media, scared by their leaders and gently instructed by the Empire.

…but they don’t listen. They vote the wrong way, and in such numbers that the usual checks and balances, all the little tweaks in the process, and lost ballots and “accidents” STILL don’t swing the vote.

Now ’tis all in pieces, all coherence gone. You have to move. You have to put his right.

The Prime Minister has resigned, and his (hopefully temporary) replacement is being chosen from a small group of millionaires by a slightly larger group of millionaires. The popular socialist opposition has come under constant attack from ambitious Neo-Liberals in his own party and the vast majority of the press, all funded and connected by a PR firm with strong connections to an ex-PM and war criminal. All evidence points to this being a planned coup.

All the while, lawyers and politicians are arguing over the legality of the referendum, the demographics of the vote, the nature of a “parliamentary democracy”. Thousands of people march through the capital, a supposed grassroots movement, supplied with loudspeakers and stages and a big screen from…somewhere....MORE

The last thing I read that slipped so smoothly into gear was:

“Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin, and I was off on the biggest adventure of my life … But first let me tell you a little about myself....

 -Max Shulman Sleep Till Noon (Doubleday, 1950)

Or maybe not.
I do like that "The portraits are askew along the corridors of power" though.

"How “Amexit” sent shockwaves through the financial markets"

From The Economist's Graphic Detail:

BRITAIN'S decision to leave the European Union has sent shockwaves across the financial community. On June 24th, the day after the referendum, shares in Britain's FTSE 100 stock index fell by 3% and the pound hit a 31-year low against the dollar. London's status as Europe's financial capital is now under question and many fear the end of London's dominance as a financial centre.

Difficult divorces are not new in Albion. 240 years ago, the Kingdom of Great Britain saw a different kind of Brexit: the American revolution. On July 4th, 1776 America's newly-formed Continental Congress ratified the Declaration of Independence, formally separating ties with the British crown. While the geopolitical consequences of Amexit are clear, relatively little attention has been paid to the economic ramifications.

Wars as it turns out can be costly: trade flows to and from Britain slowed and government debt rose from 106% of GDP to over 150% by the end of the war. Investors were worried: yields on consols (government bonds with no expiration date) shot up two percentage points, while share prices fell and would not recover until...MORE

Izabella Kaminska Talks Scale

And a reader teases her with mushrooms. See after the jump.
I was thinkin' of linkin' to a post on Uber's network effects (and some of the lack thereof) but this is better.

From FT Alphaville:

The London scaling effect

Geoffrey West, theoretical physicist at the University of Santa Fe, has made a name for himself crunching data from cities, organisms and companies and figuring out the commonalities in how they all scale.

Thus far his work is indicating that a single universal scaling law — linked to network effects — could be behind the growth patterns of all these systems.

For example, the mammals he’s looked at scale in a sub-linear manner, meaning the bigger they are the less energy they use per unit of mass, and the slower their metabolic rates become. The smaller the animal, meanwhile, the more energy they use per unit of mass. The findings are consistent across a wide range of animals.

This means that the bigger a mammal is the more efficient it is at distributing energy the larger it gets. But the growth is not open-ended. Eventually things plateau out and the organism gets old and dies.

The same scaling phenomenon, West says, applies to city infrastructure. The bigger the city, the fewer petrol stations/restaurants/hospitals it needs per capita etc. And the same can equally be said of most companies.

And yet, West has found that unlike biological entities or companies, city growth seems thus far to be open ended. It’s very hard to kill a city, he says — something he puts down to the influence of the socio-economic systems from which cities are ultimately derived.

Unlike other network systems, socio-economic systems — everything from social encounters, creativity, innovation, art and culture — scale in a super-linear fashion, meaning the bigger the system is the more of these things become observable and the faster the system moves in general. Equally, an ever greater share of cognitive input is needed to keep them going and growing, something that becomes expressed in a faster pace of life....MORE, including video.

To which one of the commenters replied:

alexander.campbell
 
... This seems to be confusing variation in size across species with variation in size in a single organism over the course of an animal's life. And there are very obvious reasons why, for example, a mouse should not continue growing until it is the size of the Emirates Stadium, which have nothing to do with efficiency of distributing energy.

Conversely, the largest organism in the world at present weighs 6,000 tonnes and is about five miles across, and there's no obvious reason why it should not grow to ten times that size.

That organism is a Honey fungus, or Armillaria, about which one U.S. Forest Service scientist writes:

...One of the primary questions that is asked is why does anyone care about distinguishing the species of Armillaria?
From the mycophagist's view they are all similarly edible and delicious... 

-Thomas J. Volk, "The state of taxonomy of the genus Armillaria"

Mycophagist is a fancy word for mushroom eater.

Amish Country Fireworks, Arthur Illinois

Putting the pyro in pyrotechnics.

From the Chicago Tribune:

If you have a good spot, you don't just witness the town of Arthur's fiery Fourth of July display.
You also feel its heat on your skin.

That's what people in the town of 2,300 south of Champaign say about their traditional celebration, which features fireworks, yes, but also plumes of fire, reaching hundreds of feet into the air.

The blazing display draws upward of 40,000 out-of-towners who choke the surrounding central Illinois country roads with bumper-to-bumper traffic by midafternoon. Many members of the nearby Old Order Amish population — about 4,500 strong — sit atop the roofs of their sheds, barns and houses to watch the fireworks and flames.

"They're indescribable," said Christy Miller, the town's tourism director. "It'll put you to tears."

From start to finish, Arthur's Independence Day show lasts 24 1/2 minutes and features everything from the fireballs to classic fireworks and a horseman dressed in 19th-century riding clothes who gallops through a Niagara Falls of bright white sparks, U.S. flag in hand.

Larry Schlabach, a former member of the Amish community turned pyrotechnic, spends all year preparing for it.

In the minutes leading up to the portion of the show when he launches a carefully choreographed spectacle of fireballs, Schlabach said he thinks about the crowds spanning up to 10 miles in each direction who for months eagerly await his show.

"When you have a stage like that, it really motivates you," Schlabach said. "I only have a three-minute window every year … I like to take advantage of it."

An ex-Amish pyrotechnic
A homemade cannon with bowling balls as ammunition gave Schlabach, his brothers and his cousins — all of whom were raised Amish — their start in pyrotechnics.

Larry Schlabach, left, talks to Merle Miller, neighborhood handyman, after applying a few decals on a fireball cannon named Vesuvius. (Brandon Chew / Chicago Tribune)

When they learned how to ignite a fireball in a bucket using black powder and coffee creamer, the Schlabach boys filled a minivan full of the stuff, effectively cleaning out Sam's Club. From there they graduated to buckets, then 50-gallon tubs and eventually propane tanks that spouted fireballs 200 feet.

"When you do it," Schlabach said, "you know you shouldn't be."

In 2003, Schlabach inaugurated Arthur's Fourth of July pyrotechnics segment by lining up and lighting a 500-foot row of simultaneous fireballs. Some residents remained convinced the fiery exhibit was a horrible accident until it happened again the next year — and every year since....MORE

Do click through for the video, these people are nuts.

Here's some amateur video of the whole show, filmed July 2:

Dutch Deploy Boomy McBoomface

From Maritime Executive:

Ocean Cleanup Launches Boomy McBoomface

The Ocean Cleanup, the Dutch foundation developing technologies to rid the oceans of plastic, has unveiled its North Sea prototype. The prototype will become the first ocean cleanup system ever tested at sea.

The prototype will be installed in the North Sea, 12 nautical miles off the Dutch coast, where it will remain for one year. The objective is to test how The Ocean Cleanup’s floating barrier fares in extreme weather at sea – the kind of conditions the system will eventually face when deployed in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The 100 meter-long barrier segment deployed in the North Sea will help validate the survivability of the system. Sensors will track every motion of the prototype and the loads it is subjected to. The data gathered will enable engineers to develop a system fully resistant to severe conditions during the cleanup of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. At the North Sea test site, conditions during a minor storm are more severe than those in exceptionally heavy storms (occurring once every 100 years) in the Pacific Ocean.

The Ocean Cleanup’s cleaning technology makes use of long floating barriers which act as an artificial coastline, passively catching and concentrating ocean debris. The system is powered by the ocean’s natural currents. Testing the barriers is important because of their crucial role in the cleanup concept. Although some trash may be caught during the North Sea prototype test, collecting plastic is not its objective.

Boyan Slat, CEO and founder of The Ocean Cleanup, said “I estimate there is a 30 percent chance the system will break, but either way it will be a good test.”...MORE

HT: gCaptain who also note "Icelandic firm offers England players free whale-watching holiday to 'recover from defeat'" in one of the more eclectic linkfests on the internet.

"Is Russia's Economy Doomed to Collapse?"

A major piece from The National Interest, July 1:

“Russia is isolated with its economy in tatters,” said President Obama in his State of the Union address on January 20, 2015. At that time, many thought it was true: the Russian currency was in free fall, while the federal budget was losing its revenues and beginning to extensively rely on reserves accumulated in previous years, and so many experts predicted the collapse of the Russian economy—an economic decline of 10 percent or more, comparable to the 2008–09 crisis. But though the Russian economy plunged into a crisis and could not halt its decline for six consecutive quarters, the real scale of the economic shocks was significantly smaller. The fall in GDP was 3.7 percent in 2015, and most experts foresee a drop of around 1 percent in 2016. Oil prices’ rebound from their nadir allowed the ruble not only to stabilize, but to gain a foothold. A 10 percent fall in private consumption has not led to any visible increase in social tension.

Short-term forecasts for the Russian economy are gloomy, and do not envisage a rapid post-crisis recovery. In the medium and long run, if the conflict in eastern Ukraine is not peacefully resolved and Western sanctions are not removed, the economic situation may worsen, but no collapse will occur. The primitive structure of the Russian economy and Putin’s pro-market economic doctrine will prevent chaos, and disasters will not be able to turn around the economy’s sluggish growth.

The Economy’s Surprising Stabilization
For many the biggest mystery of the past year was the relatively moderate drop in the Russian economy. In early 2015, many experts predicted an inevitable 8–10 percent decline, basing their projections on the fall of the ruble, falling imports and expectations of falling investment. However, nothing of the sort happened. Why? I see three reasons for this.

First, the base of the Russian economy is the production and export of raw materials and commodities. Unlike 2008–09, there is no crisis in the global economy, and the main consumers of Russian raw materials (Europe, China and Middle East) continue to grow, albeit unevenly; there has been no reduction in demand for Russian raw materials this time, as opposed to six years ago. Moreover, the key product of Russian exports—oil and refined products—recorded a slight increase, both in production and in exports. The stability of the Russian raw-material sector entailed the stability of railway cargo (more than 70 percent of its turnover is raw materials and commodities) and pipeline transportation volumes (which in terms of its effect on GDP is equal to railway-cargo turnover).

Taxation of the Russian oil and gas sector is structured such that the main part of the increase in world oil prices benefits the budget. And, vice versa, the decrease in oil prices hits the financial situation of oil companies at a much smaller scale than the revenue base of the federal budget. Moreover, all export-oriented industries benefited from the devaluation of the ruble (local production costs paid in rubles devalued in currency terms) and from the government's policy of freezing wages in the public sector; workers’ pressure to raise wages plummeted. All this has allowed the raw-materials sector to maintain production and keep the necessary investments.

Second, by 2015, the Russian government launched a full-throttle program to finance ambitious military procurement and reinvestment into the defense industries, which are mainly state-owned. On this basis, the production of military products in 2013–15 grew by 15–20 percent annually, and approximately the same growth should continue in 2016. The rapid growth of the military industry evidently benefited many industrial sectors and prevented the decline in industry as a whole.

Third, thanks to the reforms of the nineteen-nineties, the Russian economy became a market one, that is, it is inclined to restore equilibrium using a free-floating ruble exchange rate. We must acknowledge the Russian authorities, who not only did not freeze prices during the crisis, but did not even discuss this idea. As a result, the economy was able to quickly adjust to shocks both external (decline of oil prices and 50 percent devaluation of the ruble) and internal (a ban on food imports from Western countries). However, the price of this adjustment was the rise in inflation to 17 percent in spring 2015, a 10 percent decrease in the level of private consumption and 40 percent reduction in imports.

The Ruble’s Rollercoaster
The second important mystery of the past year, the fast recovery of the ruble after its collapse in December 2014 and its relative stability afterwards, can be solved much more easily.

On the one hand, since 2012 the ruble has been an “oil currency,” as is evident from comparing the movements of oil prices and the ruble-to-dollar exchange rate rate. Statistically, in the 2014–2015, 92 percent of the fluctuations in the ruble-dollar rate were explained by changes in oil price. In the first half of 2015, oil prices were slowly, but steadily, growing from $32 per barrel in January to $65 per barrel by the beginning of the summer. Thus the stabilization of the ruble exchange rate in the spring of 2015 and its strengthening by 50 percent, as well as the slight increase in foreign exchange reserves of the Bank of Russia, should not be surprising. As soon as oil prices fell in the fall of 2015, the ruble devalued as well, and as oil prices recovered in the spring of 2016, the ruble regained its value....MUCH MORE

Infographic: The Merging Worlds of Technology and Cars

From Bloomberg:

,,, Fiat Chrysler Chief Executive Officer Sergio Marchionne thinks it makes no sense for carmakers to spend billions of dollars developing competing, yet largely identical systems. To share some of the risk—and the cost—the incumbent automotive giants and their would-be disruptors are teaming up in an ever-growing, ever more complex series of alliances.

So Fiat Chrysler, for instance, has paired up with Google to develop 100 self-driving minivans, and is in discussions with Uber about a similar venture. Google has, in turn, invested in Uber, as have Toyota, Microsoft and Tata, owner of Jaguar Land Rover. Bill Ford, chairman of the eponymous carmaker, has meanwhile invested in Lyft, as has General Motors, and Lyft has partnered with China’s Didi, itself the subject of a $1 billion investment from Apple.

...MORE

HT: The Big Picture

The Trouble With Reinforced Concrete

Rebar: more than just a vehicle for daytrading Chinese grandmothers:

From The Conversation:

By itself, concrete is a very durable construction material. The magnificent Pantheon in Rome, the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome, is in excellent condition after nearly 1,900 years. And yet many concrete structures from last century – bridges, highways and buildings – are crumbling. Many concrete structures built this century will be obsolete before its end.

Given the survival of ancient structures, this may seem curious. The critical difference is the modern use of steel reinforcement, known as rebar, concealed within the concrete. Steel is made mainly of iron, and one of iron’s unalterable properties is that it rusts. This ruins the durability of concrete structures in ways that are difficult to detect and costly to repair.

While repair may be justified to preserve the architectural legacy of iconic 20th-century buildings, such as those designed by reinforced concrete users like Frank Lloyd Wright, it is questionable whether this will be affordable or desirable for the vast majority of structures. The writer Robert Courland, in his book Concrete Planet, estimates that repair and rebuilding costs of concrete infrastructure, just in the United States, will be in the trillions of dollars – to be paid by future generations.

Steel reinforcement was a dramatic innovation of the 19th century. The steel bars add strength, allowing the creation of long, cantilevered structures and thinner, less-supported slabs. It speeds up construction times, because less concrete is required to pour such slabs.

Cheap and effective, in the short term at least. Luigi Chiesa/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

These qualities, pushed by assertive and sometimes duplicitous promotion by the concrete industry in the early 20th century, led to its massive popularity.

Reinforced concrete competes against more durable building technologies, like steel frame or traditional bricks and mortar. Around the world, it has replaced environmentally sensitive, low-carbon options like mud brick and rammed earth – historical practices that may also be more durable.

Early 20th-century engineers thought reinforced concrete structures would last a very long time – perhaps 1,000 years. In reality, their life span is more like 50-100 years, and sometimes less. Building codes and policies generally require buildings to survive for several decades, but deterioration can begin in as little as 10 years.

Many engineers and architects point to the natural affinities between steel and concrete: they have similar thermal expansion characteristics, and concrete’s alkalinity can help to inhibit rust. But there is still a lack of knowledge about their composite qualities – for example, in regard to sun-exposure-related changes in temperature.

The many alternative materials for concrete reinforcement – such as stainless steel, aluminium bronze and fibre-polymer composites – are not yet widely used. The affordability of plain steel reinforcement is attractive to developers. But many planners and developers fail to consider the extended costs of maintenance, repair or replacement.

There are technologies that can address the problem of steel corrosion, such as cathodic protection, in which the entire structure is connected to a rust-inhibiting electric current. There are also interesting new methods to monitor corrosion, by electrical or acoustic means....MORE

"The $3 Billion Family Art Feud"

From the Wall Street Journal:

Vincent Van Gogh, ‘The Olive Pickers,’ 1889

For half a century starting in the 1950s, Greek shipping mogul Basil Goulandris and his wife, Elise, lived in a manner worthy of a sun-soaked, Patricia Highsmith novel. They palled around with European aristocracy and flitted among their seven homes in places like Paris, New York’s Southampton and Switzerland’s Gstaad—when they weren’t sailing around the world on their yacht, “Paloma.”

The couple never had children. Instead, relatives say they devoted their energies to amassing one of the world’s best private art collections, valued at as much as $3 billion by one estimate. The trove of several hundred pieces included 11 Picassos, six van Goghs, five Cezannes and a rare pair of Monet’s 1894 views of the Rouen Cathedral, one bathed in blue hues and the other one in pink. The couple also had a bronze ballerina by Degas, a Pollock and a Balthus. When Balthus’s biographer, Nicholas Fox Weber, visited the couple in Switzerland, he said the paintings rimming their walls “made my knees go wobbly.”

The Goulandris collection is now at the center of one of the biggest and most complex legal disputes over art in Europe—including a bombshell revelation in the Panama Papers. The saga involves a collection of treasures that have largely been hidden for the past two decades, a secret seller using an offshore company to put up paintings for auction and a fight that boils down to one nonexistent will and one cryptic one.

The chief protagonist in this 16-year family feud is a niece of the Goulandris’s who claims she and her cousins should have inherited much of the couple’s art after their aunt Elise died in 2000. The niece, Aspasia Zaimis, a feisty shipbuilder’s wife who is in her 70s and lives in Athens, says her aunt owned the trove when she died and intended for it to go to her relatives. Another set of cousins on her uncle’s side—and the couple’s namesake foundation—say otherwise. “People who say the collection wasn’t hers anymore are being unfair and degrading to my aunt,” Ms. Zaimis said. “I’m fighting for her.”

Her main opponent is one of the couple’s longtime employees, a soft-spoken, snowy-haired historian named Kyriakos Koutsomallis, who manages the art collection of the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation in Athens, which claims a right to some of the disputed art. Mr. Koutsomallis and the foundation are currently transforming a neoclassical mansion in Athens to become a 12-story museum that’s expected to display at least some of the Goulandris collection when it opens early next year. Mr. Koutsomallis, along with relatives on Mr. Goulandris’s side of the family, claim the most valuable pieces of the couple’s art collection—83 works— were quietly sold to an offshore company several years before Mr. Goulandris died and should not be part of any inheritance claims. Twenty nine of those 83 paintings—including some choice works like Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 “Olive Pickers” —have since been redirected back to the foundation, Mr. Koutsomallis has said in court papers, and are therefore not part of the widow’s estate. No one will say where the remaining works are located.

To finance her continuing court battles, Ms. Zaimis has made an unusual arrangement with a longtime New York private dealer, Ezra Chowaiki. In exchange for the lucrative rights to sell any paintings should Ms. Zaimis eventually prevail, Mr. Chowaiki said he has helped fund a case in Greece which Ms. Zaimis filed in 2001 and later shifted to Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

Arrangements like these are rare outside the realm of Nazi art restitution. Heirs to lost Jewish fortunes often team up with art lawyers who work for a promised share of any eventual art sales—an arrangement depicted in last year’s Helen Mirren film, “Woman in Gold.”
 
Now, art lawyers are following the Goulandris case to see if Mr. Chowaiki’s long bet on the collection, which he estimates is valued at $3 billion, will pay off or flounder. No estate worth more than roughly $500 million has ever come to auction. Thomas C. Danziger, a New York art lawyer who isn’t involved with the case, said, “It’s Agatha Christie meets Homer.”

One big reason for the ownership dispute: Mr. Goulandris died in 1994 without a will. After his death at age 81, relatives from his side of the family say they told his widow that in 1985 Mr. Goulandris had sold off the 83 gems of the couple’s collection to a Panamanian company controlled by his side of the family. It was called Wilton Trading. Mr. Goulandris was in debt at the time, the relatives say, and thus he accepted a firesale price of $31.7 million, or roughly $382,000 apiece. Elise Goulandris didn’t initially know about the sale but she allegedly went along with it, relatives said in court documents....MUCH MORE

"Markets Head Quietly into the Weekend"

From Marc to Market:

The US dollar is little changed ahead of what will likely be a thin North American session due to the US holiday on Monday.   The Australian and New Zealand dollars are attracting flows, ostensibly as a place to park funds, even though tomorrow's Australian election looks a dead heat.    

Falling yields seem to be offsetting the rise in equities as a driver for the yen, which is the strongest currency today, gaining 0.6% against the dollar.   The greenback was turned lower after making a marginal new high for the week in  Asia near JPY103.40.  A break and close below yesterday's low (~JPY102.35) would be bearish technical development.   

Most bond yields are lower, with the US 10-year yield off four bp to 1.41% a new low.  European bond yields are mostly lower as well.  Talk that the ECB is considering moving away from the capital key determinant of its sovereign bond purchases to a debt-weighted is helping depress yields.  The idea is that given the further decline in Germany yields post-Brexit, many Germany bunds no longer qualify.   

The ECB's rules prohibit buying bonds with yields less than the deposit rate.  This now excludes Germany bunds out seven years.  Also, the fact that the premium over Germany widened may also be of concern to the ECB.   However, to buy based on the size of the debt market would mean the ECB would accumulate bonds of the largest debtor (Italy) and the surplus countries are likely to balk on grounds that it will lead to a deterioration of the quality of the ECB's balance sheet.  It will become a bad bank.  

Separately the EU agreed yesterday to the Italian government providing as much as 150 bln euro liquidity guarantee for Italian banks if needed.    This might make it easier for Italian banks to sell bonds, but to boost core capital, this is unlikely to prove sufficient.  Moreover, there needs to be stronger incentive to restructure the industry.   There is also some talk of increasing the size of the Atlas Fund,  the privately financed backstop.  We still think there is scope to increase the role of Italy's development bank CDP....MORE    

Autonomy: "Rolls-Royce’s cargo ship of the future requires no onboard crew"

They surely can't do any worse than the guys in the second story, below.
And, as per the image, dry bulk carriers seems smarter, at first, than tankers or passenger ships.

From Yahoo Finance:

Massive crewless cargo ships plying the world's oceans may sound far-fetched, but Rolls-Royce has been working on the idea for a number of years now. In fact, the company says it expects the first remotely controlled vessels to sail into operation by 2020.

While most of us associate the Rolls-Royce name with luxury cars and jet engines, it also has strong links to the marine sector where it designs vessels and integrates power systems.

Separate from the car business, Rolls-Royce Holdings has for some time been researching the idea of autonomous and remotely controlled cargo ships that it says could take to the high seas as early as 2020.

The futuristic-looking vessels can be monitored remotely by a “captain” stationed at a base anywhere around the world, Oskar Levander, the company’s VP of marine innovation, explained recently at the Autonomous Ship Technology Symposium in Amsterdam.

Adamant that autonomous shipping is just around the corner, Levander said, “This is happening. It’s not if, it’s when. The technologies needed to make remote and autonomous ships a reality exist … we will see a remote-controlled ship in commercial use by the end of the decade.”

Tests of a simulated autonomous ship control system are already underway in Finland, and trials of sensor arrays in different operating and climatic conditions are also being carried out, the company said.

Despite its confident claim that the ships will be plying the world’s waters in the next four years, Rolls-Royce admits there’s still much work to be done, including navigating regulatory hurdles and careful examination of the safety and security implications of operating remotely operated ships....MORE

And from gCaptain:

Coast Guard: Oil Tanker Hit Sailboats AND Ran Aground – Here’s Incident Video

 MT Chem Venus (former Golden Venus). Credit: MarineTraffic.com/Les Blair

The U.S. Coast Guard is trying to determine how exactly a 477-foot oil tanker lost control and collided with three sailboats before running aground Wednesday at the Maine-New Hampshire border.

A new video of the accident shows the MT Chem Venus hit at least two moored sailboats before a large crash can be heard, presumably from the ship hitting bottom or some other object.

The incident occurred at about 4 p.m. Wednesday on Piscataqua River near the Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Kittery, Maine border. The Coast Guard said the ship struck three moored sailboats and ran aground near Goat Island Ledge. The sailboats were unmanned at the time and no injuries were reported.

Salvage divers arrived Thursday afternoon to assess the extent of the damage to the Chem Venus and found a tear measuring 3 feet by 10 feet in the bow of the tanker, according to the Coast Guard.
...MORE

"Pimco Says Market Underestimates Fed Rate Path, Recommends TIPS"

We have been fans since around February when the realization that "Saaay, these things might work for both inflation and for slow growth environments".  We may be slow but eventually we do catch on.
Here's the largest of the TIPS ETFs via FinViz:

From Bloomberg:

June 30, 2016 — 8:52 PM CDT Updated on July 1, 2016 — 12:54 AM CDT

• TIPS return 6.6% in first half, versus 5.7% for nominal bonds
• Gauge of inflation expectations falls to record after Brexit

Pacific Investment Management Co., which manages the world’s biggest active bond fund, says traders are underestimating the potential for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates following Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.

The bond firm also says it’s a good time to buy Treasury Inflation Protected Securities. It has been recommending TIPS throughout 2016. The securities returned 6.6 percent in the first half, versus 5.7 percent for the broader market, based on Bank of America Corp. data. Financial markets don’t expect a rate increase until the end of 2018, according to a Pimco report Thursday on the company website.

“That to us seems implausible and we think it worth positioning for a faster pace of tightening,” Andrew Balls, the London-based chief investment officer for global fixed income, wrote in the report. “U.S. TIPS are attractively priced and offer valuable protection against the possibility of higher U.S. inflation over the coming years.”

Treasury 10-year note yields fell two basis points to 1.45 percent as of 6:50 a.m. in London, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader data. The price of the 1.625 percent security due in May 2026 rose 6/32, or $1.88 per $1,000 face value, to 101 19/32. Japan’s 10-, two- and five-year yields as well as Taiwan’s 10-year yields slid to record lows.

Abandoning Bets
The Pimco Total Return Fund, the biggest actively managed bond fund with $86.1 billion in assets, has returned 4.3 percent over the past year, lagging behind about 60 percent of its peers, based on data compiled by Bloomberg.

Traders abandoned bets for the Fed to raise rates in 2016 after the U.K. voted last week to leave the EU, raising speculation the decision will curb economic growth in Britain and around the world....MORE

HT: Across the Curve

Previously:
"U.S. Sells 5-year TIPS at Negative Yield"
Consumer Inflation Comes In Lower Than Expected, TIPS Fall Like Cherry Blossoms In Gentle Spring Rain (TIP)
"TIPS Are King in Good Quarter for U.S. Fixed Income"
"Janet Yellen reiterates need for interest rates caution" (TIP)
The Fed Is Going to Let Price Inflation Run Hot
Bring On the Stagflation: "Atlanta Fed’s ‘GDP Now’ Plunges; Predicts Just 0.6% Q1 Growth"
"LPL: ‘Modest Stagflation’ Would Benefit TIPS"
"After Fed-Induced Spike, TIPS Auction Proves Weak" (TIP)
Today's Inflation Report Puts the Core Rate At Its Highest Since 2008 (and 2012)
BlackRock: "Why Now May Be the Time for TIPS"
"Is US inflation (finally) rising?"
Inflation: TIPS Breakevens Start to Rise as Economic Data Improves
No Inflation? Look At This (#3 will shock you)
"The Treasury Market Raises Its Inflation Outlook" (buy TIPS)  

And many more.

Accrington: One day. One town. One hundred years on

On this July 1st, the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme I debated whether to mark the day on the blog. The event is decidedly off topic, the facts are so disturbing and so sad, I didn't lose any family that day, and the lessons are fast receding into what Lincoln called the "mystic chords of memory". Then a friend sent me the piece below and here it is.

The lessons, like the words of the 16th President's First Inaugural Address as the U.S. approached its Civil War, are universal.

"I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

-March 4, 1861

From The Telegraph:

The Lancashire town of Accrington suffered some of the highest losses on the first, fatal day of the Somme, when its men were sent over the trenches. One century on, the legacy is still being felt today

Not long after dawn on this coming Friday, July 1, Harry Bond’s nephew, Les, will set off.
Leaving his antique Lee Enfield rifle at home, he will walk the streets of the Lancashire town of Accrington, where his forebear once learnt to parade. By 7.20 sharp, the 70-year-old will be in position. He will listen as a soldier blows a whistle then stand in silence as the name of each Accrington man to fall in the Battle of the Somme is read in turn.

“It will take quite some time,” says Mr Bond.

Exactly a century earlier, his uncle, Pte Henry Bond – Harry to his friends – also rose early. Along a 15-mile front of French meadowland, 100,000 British troops – 720 of them from Accrington and its surrounding towns – were kneeling down to pray, kissing photographs of their relatives or stepping onto fire-steps to peer out on to their fate. At last, it was time for the Big Push.

That first day of the Somme, which would last for five months, resulted in 57,470 casualties - still the worst day in our Army’s history.

Of the ten battalions which suffered the highest losses on 1 July 1916, others lost more men, but Accrington’s was the battalion most closely associated with one single place. By the end of that day, 303 men from Accrington and nearby settlements lay dead in French fields.

Back home, a whole town had reason to grieve.

In 1914, people knew Accrington, if they knew it at all, for its bricks and its cotton. When the war broke out that year, a few professionals signed up – a dentist, an architect, a managing director – but most recruits were labourers: brick workers, apprentices and shop assistants. Harry Bond, then 19, was an apprentice engineer.

They were motivated by patriotism, but also pragmatism: the town’s cotton mills were suffering and its biggest employer was beset by strikes. Many were also won over by a new national recruiting strategy, which allowed them to sign up with their friends. The town’s mayor, Capt John Harwood, offered to raise a battalion from Accrington and nearby towns; the War Office quickly accepted. Officially, they were 11th Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment. To everyone in the town, they were the Accrington Pals.

Harry Bond, third left on the front row, with some of the Accrington Pals Battalion (Courtesy Les Bond)

Back then, around 45,000 people lived in Accrington. Within just ten days, 1,076 men – about half of whom came from Accrington and district – enlisted. Harry Bond signed up on 19 September, five days after recruitment began.

At least two young men joined the Pals from every recent school class, nearly one from every street.

A war-time postcard captures the mood at the time (Accrington Library)

By 1916, war had assumed a kind of normality: in Accrington, locals adjusted to new jobs supplying munitions; in the trenches, the continent’s young men had settled into stalemate. On the morning of July 1, some of the few young men who had stayed in the town gathered on a well-tended patch of grass in their cricket whites: that afternoon, Accrington was due to take on Rishton in the Lancashire League.

Hundreds of miles away on the pockmarked remains of the Somme’s meadows, the town’s remaining youth were also preparing for their task, as set out by Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, who would soon be known as the “Butcher of the Somme”. After seven days of artillery bombardment, it should have been easy to cross No Man’s Land and take the German trenches just across the fields. So easy that they planned to walk.

At 7.15 that morning, the men shook each other’s hands. At 7.20, Capt Arnold Tough blew a whistle. By 7.30, it was clear something had gone badly wrong. The barbed wire that snaked across No Man’s Land had not been destroyed: bullets were speeding towards the Pals as they struggled across the fields. By 7.50, 584 Pals were dead or wounded.

A few hours later, back in Accrington, rain stopped play. It never resumed....MUCH MORE