Sunday, November 24, 2013

I READ ALAN HODGE'S 1985 BIOGRAPHY OF TURING

But I didn't recall the number of people who worked at Bletchley Park but this NYT bio filled me in:
Mavis Batey, 92, Allied Code Breaker in World War II
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: November 22, 2013
NY Times

The team at Bletchley Park — 12,000 people, including Americans, worked there at one time or another during the war — was composed, among others, of mathematicians, linguists, crossword mavens and an assortment of acknowledged eccentrics.
Of course, I'm not the only one with a poor memory:
The Truth About Bush (and Cheney)

By PETER BAKER
November 22, 2013
POLITICO


On the evening of the 2000 presidential election, as the vote counting stretched late into the night, a weary Dick Cheney slipped into his hotel room in Austin to lie down. But his rest was soon interrupted when word arrived that Al Gore had just conceded. Cheney was awakened and told, albeit prematurely, that he had just been elected vice president.

But who woke him up?

In his memoir, In My Time, Cheney recalls being roused with the news of Gore’s concession by his daughter, Liz Cheney.

Mary Cheney, Liz’s sister, remembers it differently in her book, Now It’s My Turn. She writes that their mother, Lynne Cheney, was the one who stirred the future vice president.

Nick Brady, an old friend from the first Bush administration who was in the hotel suite that night, recalls being the one to interrupt Cheney’s repose. And then there is Alan Simpson, the former Wyoming senator and longtime Cheney friend, who believes he was the waker. “Get up, bastard!” he remembers calling out. “You’re the vice president of the United States.”

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