The joy of Sixtus
Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg and his wife announced the birth of their sixth child, a son called Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher. But is that appropriate?
— A sixth child ought to be ‘Sextus’. Five popes were called Sixtus but the name is believed to derive from a Greek word meaning ‘polished’.
— Among the living, there is Sixtus Henry of Bourbon-Parma, whom some believe to be the rightful monarch of Spain, and Sixtus Preiss, a Viennese hip-hop artist whose work includes Samba Feelin Beein This, Trilingual Dance Sexperience and, appropriately, given the Tory performance in the general election, What a Fine Mess We’ve Made of This.
Mine decline
Jeremy Corbyn addressed a record Durham Miners’ Gala crowd, estimated at 200,000. How many might have been miners? Coal industry employment over the years:
| 1920 (peak employment) | 1,190,000 |
| 1945 (Labour’s post-war victory) | 702,000 |
| 1964 (election of Harold Wilson) | 502,000 |
| 1973 (three-day week) | 252,000 |
| 1984 (miners’ strike) | 139,000 |
| 1997 (election of Tony Blair) | 14,000 |
| 2015 (last UK deep coal mine closes) | 200 |
Source: ONS
Employ yourself
The Taylor Review into work practices was published. Which industries have the highest number of self-employed workers?
| Construction | 966,000 |
| Professional, scientific and technical activities |
597,000 |
| Wholesale, retail and repair of motor vehicles | 393,000 |
| Admin and Support Service | 352,000 |
| Transport and storage | 292,000 |
Old balls please
The owner of a golfing company was jailed for manslaughter after the death of an amateur diver he had paid between £20 and £40 a day to retrieve golf balls from a lake. (Professional divers would have cost £1,000 a day.) How many golf balls must you find to make a living from it?
—A pack of 40 secondhand Titleist NXT Tour golf balls costs £12.99 online.
—At that rate, ignoring costs, you need to find 23 balls an hour to earn the equivalent of the national minimum wage.
—There are lots to find; US golfers lose 300 million golf balls a year, says CNN.
— Texas-based LostGolfBalls.com claims to find and sell between 40 million and 50 million a year. It has 50 full-time staff.
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