Apple fashion lacked byte!
QUESTION
Did Apple launch a clothing line? YES, a bunch of computer geeks tried to make their mark in the world of fashion — and, unsurprisingly, failed.
Apple was founded as a garage start-up in 1976 by Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne to sell the Apple 1 personal computer, hand-built by Wozniak.
The company was initially successful in bringing the computer age to the masses, but by 1985, it was in the doldrums.
Jobs had been ousted and the Macintosh Classic, the LC (an upgraded Apple II) and the Performa budget series all performed poorly.
This failure was mirrored by the bizarre decision to launch a clothing line. The 1986 Apple Collection consisted of oversized sweatshirts and windbreakers in obnoxiously bright patterns.
In every way it was the antithesis of the ubiquitous black turtlenecks favoured by Steve Jobs. It was a dismal failure.
Jobs went on to found NeXT — a computer firm, not the fashion store — which was bought out by Apple in 1997. Jobs returned to Apple and became chief executive, a post he held until 2011, just before his death from cancer. His iMac revived the firm’s fortunes and set it on its path to global domination.
The Apple Collection of clothes is now highly desirable, with items selling for hundreds of pounds on eBay.
Harry Davies, Kidderminster, Worcs.
QUESTION
George W. Bush’s moving eulogy to his father ended with: ‘Dad is hugging Robin and holding Mom’s hand again.’ Who was Robin? PAULINE RoBINSoN (‘Robin’) Bush was the second child of George and Barbara Bush. Born in California on December 20, 1949, she was named after her late grandmother, who had been killed in a car crash a few weeks earlier.
Aged three, she was diagnosed with leukaemia. The family moved to New York for treatment, but to no avail. Robin died on october 11, 1953, aged three.
The Bush family went on to establish the Bright Star Foundation for leukaemia research. Robin’s grave is in the grounds of the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, near Dallas, Texas. Her parents have been interred next to her.
Christopher Horne, Watford, Herts.
QUESTION
Was Karl Marx obsessed with blood-sucking vampires? KARL MARX, the German philosopher and political theorist who had a profound effect on 20th-century politics, loved to punctuate his works with literary and historical allusions.
Gothic metaphors were in vogue in the mid to late 19th century when he was writing his major works, The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.
Marx was enamoured by the idea of capitalism as vampirism, sucking the lifeblood of the workers.
Though Bram Stoker’s Dracula was not published until 1897, an undead creature feeding on the blood of the living had entered the popular imagination following the publication of James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney The Vampire, a weekly serial that ran from 1845 to 1847.
In an early work, Grundrisse, Marx described capital as ‘constantly sucking in living labour as its soul, vampire-like’, and as ‘sucking its living soul out of labour’. In 1864’s Inaugural Address of The International Working Men’s Association, Marx describes British industry as ‘vampire-like’, which ‘could but live by sucking blood, and children’s blood, too’.
His most famous use of the metaphor is in Das Kapital, where he claimed: ‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’
Dr Ken Bristow, Glasgow.
QUESTION
Have any of King Arthur’s 12 battlefields been identified? FURTHER to the earlier account of King Arthur’s battles in the 9th-century work Historia Brittonum, the Welsh monk Nennius was writing 300 years after the events he described, so pinpointing locations is problematic.
The detailed study of the evidence in my book Arthur, Warrior And King, suggests they all took place in the South and West of England, mainly Hampshire, Dorset, Somerset and the upper Thames valley.
All the sites I put forward are conjectural and the evidence is complicated, but I can say with some certainty that none of the battles took place in Scotland.
one battlesite, the forest of Celidon, is mentioned by Julius Caesar and other Roman writers because that is where he fought the Britons. It must be in Kent or Surrey as Caesar didn’t go anywhere else. The first mention of Scotland as Caledonia came 150 years after Caesar.
The battle of Castellum Guinnion was likely to have been Glastonbury, and turns up elsewhere as the battle of the trees. It was a struggle involving the Refuge of the Holy Maiden (Welsh, caisel gwyn rian) or a fort of girls (Latin,
castellum puellarum or Norman French, chateau des pucelles).
There is no real evidence for Solsbury Hill as the site of the important Battle of Badon. Yes, it is a hill fort, but it was not occupied in the 6th century. A better bet is the complex of three hill forts at Clifton, Bristol, where Brunel’s suspension bridge crosses the Avon Gorge. The Welsh name for the area was Caer
Odor in nante Badon (the border fort in the Badon Gorge). The gorge appears to have been named after Irish chieftain Baetan MacCairill. The battle Dun Baetan may be the same place.
The Domesday Book calls the Clifton site Sineshoved (pig or boar head), which is a Saxon translation of Dun (fort or headland) and Baetan (Irish, a boar).
There is an archaeological record of 6thcentury occupation. In the 18th century, many bodies of warriors from this era were dug up. There are also strong local traditions of battle recorded by William of Worcester (c. 1480) and others.
The evidence for Clifton is more compelling than any other site. We may at last have discovered the site of King Arthur’s famous Battle of Badon.
Don Carleton, Bristol.