The Two Humphreys
Here’s a weird and highly personal addition to my blog of illustrations about why the title of my book, “What Goes Around Comes Around – A Guide To How Life REALLY Works” is actually true and a law of nature & physics.
It certainly got my attention when I spotted this gent’s obituary.
My father’s name was Humphrey Davis. This guy was Humphrey Davies! They were the exact same age when they both checked out.
My Dad was riddled with cancer from his prolific pipe smoking and being around my wonderful Mother, who was was a two pack, a day Chesterfield smoker until her mid-fifties.
She made it to just past her 83rd birthday, when the lung cancer caught up to her. She hadn’t quit soon enough.
This new Humphrey died from complications of pancreatic cancer, almost certainly smoking induced!
How’s “them there” for some random coincidences?
The most regrettable thing about my mom and dad was that they were both from families with many who lived well into their nineties. They were a great couple and wonderful people, but they left so much on the table because of that demon, smoking! I hate it and it pains me when I see others going down that path.
And as if that wasn’t enough to make me a loather of pipes and cigarettes, both of my sisters, one younger and one older, were also smoking induced cancer victims, leaving me as the last one standing in my nuclear family.
It is sad for me to think about, but also important to note that in all cases the tragedy of it was driven by each one’s individual choices. They lit the matches, sucked in the smoke, took it deep into their lungs, and ultimately cut their own lives short. Each was a clear and undeniable case of “The Law of Cause & Effect” in action. Whether we refer to it like that, or as Karma, or by the title of my book, “What Goes Around Comes Around,” they are just different ways to say the same thing. I couldn’t stop them, but I hope reading this may help someone else to avoid that fate.
Thankfully there are other generations on their journeys who will hopefully carry good as well as healthy thoughts and memories of their Dad and Grandpa!
Thankfully there are other generations who I hope will remember me and us kindly, I hope the same for Humphrey #2!
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/books/humphrey-davies-dead.html?smid=em-share
Humphrey Davies, Noted Translator of Arabic Literature, Dies at 74
He introduced numerous novels, including works by the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, to English language readers.
Humphrey Davies, an award-winning translator into English of some of the most important and renowned works of contemporary Arabic literature, including novels by the Egyptian Nobelist Naguib Mahfouz and the prominent Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, died on Nov. 12 at a hospital in London. He was 74.
The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his daughter, Clare Davies, said.
Mr. Davies was a key figure in introducing contemporary Middle Eastern writers to an English language audience, rendering their prose into English with crisp and precise translations rich in nuance and sensitivity to the original. He displayed remarkable breadth, translating nonfiction and medieval works as well.
Mr. Davies translated more than 30 books from Arabic, among them novels by Mr. Khoury, including “Gate of the Sun” (1998; translated in 2005) and “Yalo” (2002; translated in 2009), each of which won him the prestigious Banipal Arabic Literary Translation award. His 2018 translation of Mr. Khoury’s “My Name is Adam” (2016) brought him the English PEN Translates award.
He also translated works by the Egyptian novelists Alaa Al Aswany and Mohamed Mustagab, along with “Thebes at War” (1944, translated in 2003) a classic of contemporary Arabic literature by Mr. Mahfouz, who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature.
In 2008, the British Society of Authors honored Mr. Davies’ 2004 translation of Mr. Al Aswany’s “The Yacoubian Building” as one of the 50 most outstanding translations of the previous 50 years.
An uncompromising portrait of life in Cairo, that novel dissects the psychological and sexual adventures of the residents in a single building. Mr. Davies, who lived in Cairo several times throughout his life, including the last 27 years, drew upon his intimate knowledge of the city in writing the introduction.
He noted that the Yacoubian Building actually exists but that its literary description did not exactly match the real thing. “Rather than being in ‘the high European style’ and boasting ‘balconies decorated with Greek faces carved from stone,’” he wrote, “it is a restrained yet albeit elegant exercise in Art Deco, innocent of balconies.”
Few Arabic novels were available in English until the mid-1950s. Mr. Mahfouz’s Nobel victory raised their profile, and the terrorists’ attacks of 9/11 spurred further interest in Arabic texts.
That day was a turning point, Mr. Davies said in a video interview in 2011 with the literary figure André Naffis-Sahely, when “the West as a whole — whatever that means — sort of woke up to the fact that they wanted to know, understand better, what happens in the Arab world and that literature is a route to doing that.”
The burden of introducing Arabic works to English readers “falls mainly on devoted translators, and on the small and heroic presses that have performed this service from the start,” Claudia Roth Pierpont wrote in The New Yorker in 2010.
One of those publishing houses, Archipelago Books, published Mr. Davies’ translations of four Khoury novels. “We have lost not only a remarkable translator but also a passionate advocate for Arabic literature,” Jill Schoolman, Archipelago’s founder and publisher, said in an email.
When the Banipal prize committee named his 2011 translation of “I Was Born There, I Was Born Here” (2009), by Mourid Barghouti, as a runner-up for the award, it said of Mr. Davies: “He manages a rare thing — to make you feel you are reading the book in the language in which it was written.”
Humphrey Taman Davies was born on April 6, 1947, in London. His father, John Howard Davies, was a music librarian for the BBC, and his mother, Phyllis Theresa Mabel (Corbett) Davies, was a local librarian. He graduated from the University College School, London, in 1964 and received a degree in Arabic Studies from Jesus College, Cambridge University, in 1968.
Mr. Davies spent the next year at the American University in Cairo’s Center for Arabic Studies Abroad. He worked in publishing in the Middle East for several years after that, including a stint helping to prepare a dictionary of Egyptian Arabic. He married Kristina Nelson, an ethnomusicologist who worked alongside him on the dictionary, in 1975, and they had two children. (The couple divorced in 2002.)
The family eventually headed to the United States, where Mr. Davies received a Ph.D. from the department of Near Eastern studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981.
He spent 1983 to 1997 working with humanitarian foundations in the Middle East, including Save the Children in Tunisia and the Ford Foundation in Khartoum, Sudan, and in Egypt, to which the family relocated in 1994.
Mr. Davies was inspired to take up translation of modern Arabic literature in the early 2000s by the works of a friend, the Egyptian actor and storyteller Sayed Ragab. His first published translation was of Ragab’s short story “Rat,” which appeared in 2002 in Banipal, a United Kingdom-based magazine of modern Arabic literature; its parent company hands out the Banipal awards.
Soon after, the American University in Cairo Press hired him to translate the first of two novels by Mr. Mahfouz. After the success of his work on Mr. Al Aswany’s “The Yacoubian Building,” requests for his services began pouring in. “I’m never at a loss for people wanting to translate books,” he said in the 2011 interview.
In addition to his daughter Clare, Mr. Davies is also survived by his son, James Taman Davies; a brother, Hugh; and his longtime partner, Gassim Hassan.
Mr. Davies remained devoted to his beloved Cairo even when many foreigners were leaving Egypt amid the unrest surrounding the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Having lived in Egypt for so long, he said in the video interview, it would have been impossible to pull himself away.
He turned his appreciation of the city into a book, “A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo” (2018, with Lesley Lababidi).
Mr. Davies offered his own rules for translating. No. 1 was “only translate what you like,” he told the online publication ArabLit.org. He said translators should “make three drafts, wait a month, and make a fourth.”
Above all, he placed great importance on arriving at the author’s intent. For “Gate of the Sun,” he once subjected Mr. Khoury to a nine-hour interrogation, he said in a talk after winning the Banipal award in 2010.
“To date, I have been fortunate enough to be able to consult almost all the living authors whose works I have translated,” he said, adding, “I have questions for the dead, too, when I meet them.”
Kirkus Reviews, the gold-standard for independent & accurate reviews, has this to say about
What Goes Around Comes Around:
A stable, positive, non preachy, objective voice makes the book stand apart from others in the genre. A successful guide that uses anecdotes to reveal powerful truths about life.
~ Kirkus Reviews
“I’ve read a number of books that focus on sharing a similar message, including “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, “The Answer” by John Assaraf & Murray Smith, “The Celestine Prophecy” by James Redfield, “Think and Grow Rich,” by Napoleon Hill, and I must say that I find Rob’s to be my favorite.” – Sheryl Woodhouse, founder of Livelihood Matters LLC
The two Humphreys
The two Humphreys
Here’s a case of “Group malfeasance, blamed on poor judgement, from the consumption of too much wine!” A nine month investigation of the American chapter of “The Court of Master Sommeliers” has revealed a widespread expectation/demand of sexual favors in return for mentoring female applicants, undergoing the rigorous exam process, required for membership and recognition as an official Sommellier.
This follows the complaint of 21 women that their supposed mentors, had pressured them for sex, apparently a well-established condition with a long history. So far 22 men have been investigated.
The point being, that when a lowly activity becomes “institutionalized” in a grouping of people, ie: company, sport, union, association, religion, etc, it can go on undetected for a long time. It may even acquire an almost “accepted as part of the game” kind of cover, with those participating considering it, “just one of their perks”, and no big deal! That is, until someone blows the lid off.
That’s when everything changes for those who took part. It is not after all, that they didn’t know there was something amiss about the game they were playing. They just thought they had a really good cover! Instead, that cover just went poof, as all covers eventually do. Just another example that, “What Goes Around Comes Around!” Its just difficult to predict when.
Colombo Family Crime Boss and 12 Others Are Arrested, Prosecutors Say
An indictment unsealed on Tuesday accuses the organization of orchestrating a two-decade scheme to extort a labor union.
For two decades, the leadership of the Colombo crime family extorted a Queens labor union, federal prosecutors said — an effort that continued unabated even as members of the mob clan cycled through prison, the family’s notorious longtime boss died, and as federal law enforcement closed in.
Over time, what began as a Colombo captain’s shakedown of a union leader, complete with expletive-laced threats of violence, expanded into a cottage industry, prosecutors said, as the Colombo organization assumed control of contracting and union business, with side operations in phony construction certificates, marijuana trafficking and loan-sharking.
On Tuesday, 11 reputed members and associates of the Colombo crime family, including the mob clan’s entire leadership, were charged in a labor racketeering case brought by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.
All but two of the men were arrested Tuesday morning across New York and New Jersey, prosecutors said. Another was surrendered to the authorities on Tuesday; another defendant, identified as the family consigliere, remained at large, prosecutors said.
The indictment accuses the Colombo family of orchestrating a two-decade scheme to extort an unnamed labor union that represented construction workers, using threats of violence to secure payments and arrange contracts that would benefit the crime family.
The charges are an ambitious effort by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to take down one of the city’s five Mafia families. In addition to the union extortion scheme, which is the heart of the racketeering charge, the indictment charges several misdeeds often associated with the mob, including drug trafficking, money laundering, loan-sharking and falsifying federal labor safety paperwork.
Detention hearings for the defendants in Brooklyn federal court continued into the evening Tuesday, as they entered not-guilty pleas to the charges; prosecutors had asked the court to keep 10 of the defendants in custody.
“Everything we allege in this investigation proves history does indeed repeat itself,” Michael J. Driscoll, F.B.I. assistant director-in-charge, said in a statement. “The underbelly of the crime families in New York City is alive and well.”
Around 2001, prosecutors said, Vincent Ricciardo — a reported captain in the family, also known as “Vinny Unions” — began to demand a portion of a senior labor union official’s salary. When Mr. Ricciardo was convicted and imprisoned on federal racketeering charges in the mid-2000s, prosecutors said, his cousin continued to collect those payments.
Starting in late 2019, prosecutors said, the senior leadership of the Colombo family became directly involved in the shakedown, which extended to broader efforts to siphon money from the union: for example, manipulating the selection of union health fund vendors to contract with entities connected to the family, and diverting more than $10,000 each month from the fund to the family.
Andrew Russo, 87, who prosecutors describe as the family boss, is accused of taking part in those efforts, as well as a money-laundering scheme to send the proceeds of the union extortion through intermediaries to Colombo associates. He was among nine defendants charged with racketeering.
Mr. Russo appeared in court virtually from the hospital Tuesday; he is set to be detained upon his release, pending a future bail hearing.
The family’s infamous longtime boss, Carmine J. Persico, died in federal custody in North Carolina in March 2019.
Federal law enforcement learned of the extortion scheme about a year ago, prosecutors wrote in a court filing Tuesday; investigators gathered thousands of hours of wiretapped calls and conversations recorded by a confidential witness, wrote the prosecutors, who also described law-enforcement surveillance of meetings among the accused conspirators.
The authorities said they repeatedly captured Mr. Ricciardo and his associates threatening to kill the union official. “I’ll put him in the ground right in front of his wife and kids,” Mr. Ricciardo was recorded saying in June.
On another occasion cited by prosecutors in the memo seeking his detention, Mr. Ricciardo directed the union official to hire a consultant selected by the Colombo family, saying: “It’s my union and that’s it.” Prosecutors said his activities were overseen by a Colombo soldier and the consigliere who remains at large.
Much of the activity outlined in the indictment took place while the defendants were either in prison or on supervised release for prior federal mob-related convictions. Theodore Persico Jr., described as a family captain and soldier, was released from federal prison in 2020 and, despite a directive not to associate with members of organized crime, “directed much of the labor racketeering scheme,” prosecutors said.
Mr. Persico, 58, is set to inherit the role of boss after Mr. Russo, prosecutors wrote.
Several of the defendants were named in what prosecutors described as a fraudulent safety training scheme, in which they falsified state and federal paperwork that is required for construction workers to show they have completed safety training courses.
One of the defendants, John Ragano — whom prosecutors say is a soldier in the Bonanno crime family — is accused of setting up phony occupational safety training schools in New York, which prosecutors said were “mills” that provided fraudulent safety training certificates to hundreds of people.
In October 2020, prosecutors said, an undercover law enforcement officer visited one of the schools in Ozone Park, Queens, and received, from Mr. Ricciardo’s cousin, a blank test form and an answer sheet; weeks later, the agent returned to pick up his federal safety card and paid $500.
The purported schools were also used for meetings with members of La Cosa Nostra — the group of crime families commonly known as the Mafia — and to store illegal drugs and fireworks, according to the indictment.
Mr. Ragano wasn’t charged on the racketeering count, although prosecutors also sought his detention pending trial. In addition to the racketeering count, several defendants, including Mr. Ricciardo and his cousin, were charged with extortion, conspiracy, fraud and conspiracy to make false statements.
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
Correction:
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people identified in an indictment as members of the Colombo crime family. It is 11, not more than a dozen.