| More plagiarism CONTROVERSY continues to dog the Republican Party's National Convention in Cleveland Ohio. Melania, wife of presidential candidate Donald Trump, made an opening speech which turns out to have been plagiarised from a speech made by Michelle Obama eight years ago at the Democratic Party convention. Embarrassing. Now, according to the New Yorker, the 2016 Republican Convention has become embroiled in another controversy as Biblical experts accuse Republicans of plagiarising the entire Convention scenario from the Book of Revelation. "The first thing that struck me, on Night One, was when the sun became black as sackcloth of hair and the moon like blood," the Reverend Davis Logsdon, of the University of Minnesota's Divinity School, is quoted saying. "That was just too close to be a coincidence." Logsdon said another telltale sign of plagiarism could be found in the alarming appearance of Senator Tom Cotton (Republican-Arkansas), Senator Joni Ernst (Republican-Iowa), former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and retired General Michael Flynn. "The four of them didn't ride in on horseback, but it was still clear who they were supposed to be," he said. But the Trump campaign pushed back against the plagiarism charges, as campaign manager Paul Manafort told reporters: "I swear to you that no one involved in this campaign has ever gone near a Bible." "Certain things that we've done to spice up the Convention—like having smoke rising from the Abyss like the smoke from a giant furnace, and having the sun and sky darkened by the smoke from the Abyss - have been in the planning stages for weeks." Despite the controversy, the Convention proceeded smoothly on Tuesday night, the New Yorker says, as delegates officially nominated a Beast with seven heads, ten horns, and ten crowns on his horns in a traditional roll-call vote. Great stuff! This is, of course, satirist Andy Borowitz at work again. But this time it's kind of scary.
Circuitous route
MORE on the Oz Lovett Gurkha papers which are now lodged with the Gurkha Museum in England, having got there by the somewhat circuitous route of former Gurkhas officer Peter Quantrill, Mercury reader Richard Armstrong and this column.
They were diaries from the World War II campaign in Burma against the Japanese, written by Major-General Oswald "Oz" du Tetre Lovett, who we now learn farmed at Mooi River after the war.
Peter Quantrill now relays some further information from Richard Armstrong.
"I have just spoken to Gerrit Lotz, the chap from whom I got the diary. He tells me that the general farmed on the adjoining farm in the Mooi River district.
"The general and his wife immigrated to South Africa round about 1948 (he had been governor-general of some or other Island immediately after the war).
"He gave Gerrit the diary just before he passed away some time in the late 80s . So Gerrit estimates that he had the diary for about 18 or 20 years.
"He passed it on to me in 2006. I spent some time digesting the documents and papers and then put it away in a cupboard. I forgot that it was there and only came across it when cleaning out a cupboard to make space for a tenant who has rented the lower floor of my house.
"That is when I remembered your name being mentioned in The Idler's column."
Always ready to oblige.
Runaways
OVERHEARD in the Street Shelter for the Over-Forties: "My best friend ran off with my husband. I miss her terribly."
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Tailpiece
A BUSINESSMAN is in Boston, Massachussetts, and decides to sample some scrod, the city's seafood speciality. He hails a cab.
"Do you know where I can get scrod around here."
"Sure, I know a few places. But I can tell you, it's not often I hear someone use the third person pluperfect indicative any more."
Last word
I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
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