Greek Mythological Triplets

The Fates, or Moirai, were the three goddesses of human destiny. They were represented by three spinning crones: Clotho, who spun the thread of life; Lachesis, representing chance, who measured it; and Atropos, the inevitable, who cut it.

The Furies, also known as the Erinyes or Eumenides, were the three hideous goddesses of vengeance, conceived from the drops of blood spilt when Chronos castrated his father Uranus2. Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone had snakes for hair, had wings on their backs and lived in the underworld.

The Graeae were three old hags, sisters of the Gorgons, whose cave the hero Perseus had to visit in order to find the whereabouts of Medusa. They were blind and toothless except for one eyeball and one tooth which they passed between one other.

The Graces, on the other hand, were daughters of Zeus who personified beauty, charm and joy. Euphrosyne, Aglaea and Thalia have been famously represented in oils by Raphael and in marble by Canova. One version of the famous sculpture 'graces' London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Sirens were three sea nymphs, Parthenope, Ligeia, and Leucosia, daughters of Calliope, who seduced passing seamen with their singing, so that they stopped sailing, became shipwrecked on their rocky island and eventually died of hunger. After Odysseus, having been tipped off by Circe, defied them by having himself tied to the mast, having plugged his fellow sailors' ears with wax. The Sirens consequently threw themselves to their deaths.

From http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A46904600

LGA banned words

Here is the full list of 200 words which the Local Government Association says should not be used by councils:

Across-the-piece, Actioned, Advocate, Agencies, Ambassador, Area based, Area focused, Autonomous, Baseline, Beacon, Benchmarking, Best Practice, Blue sky thinking, Bottom-Up, CAAs, Can do culture, Capabilities, Capacity, Capacity building, Cascading, Cautiously welcome, Challenge, Champion, Citizen empowerment, Client, Cohesive communities, Cohesiveness, Collaboration, Commissioning, Community engagement, Compact, Conditionality, Consensual, Contestability, Contextual, Core developments, Core Message, Core principles, Core Value, Coterminosity, Coterminous, Cross-cutting, Cross-fertilisation, Customer, Democratic legitimacy, Democratic mandate, Dialogue, Direction of travel, Distorts spending priorities, Double devolution, Downstream, Early Win, Edge-fit, Embedded, Empowerment, Enabler, Engagement, Engaging users, Enhance, Evidence Base, Exemplar, External challenge, Facilitate, Fast-Track, Flex, Flexibilities and Freedoms, Framework, Fulcrum, Functionality, Funding streams, Gateway review, Going forward, Good practice, Governance, Guidelines, Holistic, Holistic governance, Horizon scanning, Improvement levers, Incentivising, Income streams, Indicators, Initiative, Innovative capacity, Inspectorates, Interdepartmental, Interface, Iteration, Joined up, Joint working, LAAs, Level playing field, Lever, Leverage, Localities, Lowlights, MAAs, Mainstreaming, Management capacity, Meaningful consultation, Meaningful dialogue, Mechanisms, Menu of Options, Multi-agency, Multidisciplinary, Municipalities, Network model, Normalising, Outcomes, Outcomes, Output, Outsourced, Overarching, Paradigm, Parameter, Participatory, Partnership working, Partnerships, Pathfinder, Peer challenge, Performance Network, Place shaping, Pooled budgets, Pooled resources, Pooled risk, Populace, Potentialities, Practitioners, Predictors of Beaconicity, Preventative services, Prioritization, Priority, Proactive, Process driven, Procure, Procurement, Promulgate, Proportionality, Protocol, Provider vehicles, Quantum, Quick hit, Quick win, Rationalisation, Rebaselining, Reconfigured, Resource allocation, Revenue Streams, Risk based, Robust, Scaled-back, Scoping, Sector wise, Seedbed, Self-aggrandizement, Service users, Shared priority, Shell developments, Signpost, Single conversations, Single point of contact, Situational, Slippage, Social contracts, Social exclusion, Spatial, Stakeholder, Step change, Strategic, Strategic priorities, Streamlined, Sub-regional, Subsidiarity, Sustainable, Sustainable communities, Symposium ­­, Synergies, Systematics, Taxonomy, Tested for Soundness, Thematic, Thinking outside of the box, Third sector, Toolkit, Top-down, Trajectory, Tranche, Transactional, Transformational, Transparency, Upstream, Upward trend, Utilise, Value-added, Vision ­, Visionary, Welcome, Wellbeing & Worklessness.

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7949077.stm

Harland and Wolff

The Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast was once the largest in the world.

Founded by Edward Harland in 1861, then joined by Gustav Wolff, the yard has built many famous ships including the Titanic and HMS Belfast.

At its peak during the Second World War, the shipyard employed 31,000 people who built over 170 ships, from corvettes to aircraft carriers.

The shipyard’s two giant cranes, Samson and Goliath, have dominated the Belfast skyline since the early 1970s. They’re a permanent reminder to the people of Belfast of the city’s engineering giant. There was a national outcry at the suggestion they be moved and they are now listed as historic monuments.

The Harland and Wolff shipyard has the world’s biggest dry dock, a mighty 556m by 93m

Today the company has reinvented itself for a new industrial age, as it now makes any large-scale metal engineering construction including offshore wind farms, oil rigs, and bridges. And sometimes they even build and repair ships.

See http://www.discoverychannel.co.uk/machines_and_engineering/industrialrevelations/buildings/harland_wolff/index.shtml

O tempora o mores!

O tempora o mores! is a famous sentence by Cicero in his First Oration against Catiline.

It translates as Oh the times! Oh the customs!

In his opening speech against Catiline, who had previously tried to kill him, Cicero deplores the viciousness and corruption of his age. Cicero is frustrated that, despite all of the evidence that has been compiled against Catiline, who has been conspiring to overthrow the Roman government, and the fact that the senate has given senatus consultum ultimum, Catiline has not yet been executed. Cicero goes on to describe various times throughout Roman history where consuls have killed conspirators with even less evidence. Sometimes, in the case of former consul Lucius Opimius' slaughter of Gaius Gracchus (one of the Gracchi brothers) based only on "quasdam seditionum suspiciones" certain suspicions of insurrection.

This sentence is now used as an exclamation to criticize present-day attitudes and trends, often jokingly or ironically.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_tempora_o_mores!

People you REALLY need to be nice to in the Office

The PA to the boss

The person in charge of coffee

The person who can lift stuff

The geek

The person who knows where the bodies are hidden

The Commissionaire

See more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A48150957

Mr Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance …

Mr Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable.

The first line of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Loius Stevenson

The Seismoscope

In 132 A.D., a Chinese inventor called Zhang Heng displayed his amazing earthquake-detection machine, or seismoscope, at the court of the Han Dynasty. Zhang's seismoscope was a giant bronze vessel, resembling a samovar almost 6 feet in diameter. Eight dragons snaked face-down along the outside of the barrel, marking the primary compass directions. In each dragon's mouth was a small bronze ball. Beneath the dragons sat eight bronze toads, with their broad mouths gaping to receive the balls.

The exact mechanism that caused a ball to drop in the event of an earthquake is not known. One theory is that a thin stick was set loosely down the center of the barrel. An earthquake would cause the stick to topple over in the direction of the seismic shock, triggering one of the dragons to open its mouth and release the bronze ball. The sound of the ball striking the toad's mouth would alert observers to the earthquake. This would give a rough indication of the earthquake's direction of origin, but it did not provide any information about the intensity of the tremors.

See http://asianhistory.about.com/od/asianinventions/a/SeismoInvention.htm