634 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 80 PART 4 JULY 2022
power in Elizabeth’s reign; the troubles of Charles I over “ship money” are
part of the story; no less is the serious side of the life of Samuel Pepys,
who, famous as a diarist, is honored as a great Secretary of the Admiralty;
etc., etc.
British evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar figures that humans are
able to maintain about 150 connections to others, including an inner circle
of about five close friends.
The history of the Inns of Court & City Yeomanry can, according to its website,
be traced to the 1580s “when lawyers from the Inns formed Associations
to defend the country against the Spanish Armada”. Evidently, “the
regiment has an intimate relationship with the law and lawyers, earning its
nickname ‘The Devil’s Own’ from King George III in 1803, who had a dislike
for lawyers – particularly ones carrying arms”.
In the “it’s your lucky day” category, Nejeed Omar Ali Kassam and Gillian
A. Malfair were both appointed as directors of the board of the British
Columbia Lottery Corporation for terms of two years.
In the “it’s just too ironic” category, an American widow and author was
recently convicted by a jury in Portland, Oregon of the second-degree murder
of her husband. He had been shot to death as he arrived for work one
day in June 2018. Security footage eventually placed her in the vicinity of
the crime scene, but perhaps the greater clue was that she had also recently
published a story titled “How to Murder Your Husband”. That she was to
receive US$1.4 million in life insurance proceeds might also have figured
into the equation.
A Smartie is a sugar-coated chocolate in the form of an oblate spheroid with
a minor axis of about 5 mm and a major axis of about 12 mm. Smarties are
gluten-free.
The English Armada or Counter-Armada was an English fleet dispatched to
the Iberian Peninsula in 1589. England’s attempted invasion was unsuccessful,
and it appears that far more English may have been lost than Spanish
in the Spanish Armada.
María Pita is a Spanish heroine in the 1589 defence of Corunna, a port in
Galicia. Reputedly she killed an English standard bearer—according to
Wikipedia, a brother of Sir Francis Drake—which prompted the English
troops to begin a retreat. Her husband, an army captain, was nonetheless
killed by an English crossbow, whereupon María Pita shouted from the