The city of Chelyabinsk is situated to the south-east of the Urals, close to Kazakhstan and serves as a gateway to Russia’s vast Asian expanses. It lies on the Trans-Siberian Railway and is one of a string of railway towns that grew to service this immense trans-continental corridor.

It was this geographic location that ensured Chelyabinsk would grow to become a town of 45,000 by 1913. But it was its strategic position far from European Russia that ensured it would burgeon into a city under Stalin’s 1930s industrial drive and into wartime production.

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It is a vast structure, larger than the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, wider than Rome’s Parthenon and bigger than the dome of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. It is Britain’s biggest unsupported dome and was, for over two decades, the world’s biggest such structure. This nineteenth century wonder was built to create a roof over the middle of an eighteenth century octagonal building.

So what great civic architecture warranted such a record-breaking construction? A great cathedral? A town hall or assembly rooms? Perhaps a new opera house or theatre? And which of Britain’s great cities is home to this vast dome? It is, in fact, the Derbyshire Dome in Buxton, Derbyshire. It was a late Victorian design to provide a roof over the open middle of the eighteenth century stable block, supporting the building’s transformation into the Devonshire Royal Hospital.

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Vaguely Interesting Snippets | 2 May – 8 May 2012 

• James ‘Jim’ Callaghan is the only person to have served in all four of the Great Offices of State – Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary. Yes, Prime Minister - don’t give me any First Lord of the Treasury nonsense – the  Ministers of the Crown Act 1937 gives unequivocal legal recognition to the position of Prime Minister – I don’t care what it says on the front of Number 10 Downing Street!
• The UK’s first ‘public park’ was the Derby Arboretum, opening in 1840.
• The Queen has never visited Greece since acceding to the throne, despite being married to Prince Philip of Greece. In addition, Her Majesty has also avoided Israel, Egypt and has missed most of South America (with the exception of Brazil and Chile).
• The Scream recently sold at auction for $120 million. Or, to be more accurate, one version of the Scream was sold. There are actually four versions of Edvard Munch’s iconic pastel drawing (it is not an oil painting). The version sold at auction was the only one of the four to be privately owned.

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What springs to mind if you think of the phrase ‘white elephant’? Monuments to a politician’s hubris? The Millennium Dome? Unused and unloved Olympic venues around the world? Few people in England would associate this idiom directly with Elephas maximus, the Asian elephant, or imagine its roots in the royal courts of Burma and Siam.

The Oxford English Dictionary hints at the two meanings for white elephant. The first is its literal meaning – “a rare albino variety of elephant which is highly venerated in some Asian countries”. The second explains the phrase in its figurative sense:

“A burdensome or costly possession (from the story that the kings of Siam (now Thailand) were accustomed to make a present of one of these animals to courtiers who had rendered themselves obnoxious, in order to ruin the recipient by the cost of its maintenance). Also, an object, scheme, etc., considered to be without use or value.”

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The headlines in the UK press following local elections made grim reading for the Coalition leaders. The Guardian lead with “Election drubbing piles pressure on Cameron” and The Times stated that “Labour thrive on bad day for Tories”. The I on Saturday condemned the entire political class with the headline “Britain’s vote of no confidence”.

It certainly wasn’t a good night for the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats – they lost 403 and 330 councillors respectively. Labour finished the night up 824 councillors and with a strong (albeit still minority) position on the London Assembly. Only the re-election of Boris Johnson as the Mayor of London spared the Conservatives further embarrassment.

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It is an iconic image symbolising the continuity, stability and tradition at the heart of Brtiain’s monarchy. The photograph depicts three Queens in mourning at the Windsor Castle funeral of George VI, the King-Emperor who had died nine days earlier on 6 February 1952. But this is not a collection of foreign royals assembling to pay their respects to the British monarch. This is a unique image of three Queens of England (or, more properly, Queens of the United Kingdom) whose lives (and reigns) overlapped.

The most senior member of the three was Queen Mary, the Queen Consort of King George V and the mother of George VI. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, had been the Queen Consort of King George VI and the mother of Queen Elizabeth II, the third of the three royals.

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Vaguely Interesting Round-up | 21 April – 27 April 2012

• Did you know that penis enlargement surgery is performed ten times more often in Greece than the world average? Or than one in five South Korean women have had plastic surgery? Brazil is the top country for tidying up the front and back with seven times more buttock operations and five times more ‘vaginal rejuvenations’ than the 25-country average. The Economist’s Graphic Detail examines the statistical world of plastic surgery.
• The Economist’s Eastern Approaches blog looks towards the Euro 2012 football championship in Poland and Ukraine and discovers that Ukrainian facilities are not quite up to the expected standards.
• The Guardian’s Northerner Blog looks at the retirement of Britain’s last Civic Architect as Leeds prepares to bid farewell to John Thorp and his practise of urban dentistry.
• Why a close reading of French election history will make glum reading for President Sarkozy as he heads towards a show down with François Hollande in the second round of France’s presidential election.

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Stephen Irvine, 26 April 2012

Having spent many a recent night sleepless and cowering in fear under my blanket, the slightest hint of a snore or any kind of disturbance answered ten-fold with elbow, fist or knee by my beloved lady-friend, I realised this weekend that it was high time I started to fight back. Tired of being a trembling chicken but not really having the stomach to join my local boxing club, I decided the easiest way to earn some respect would be to start my own Facebook group; a rallying call to my fellow weaklings to fight back against the terror of being beaten and bullied by a 5ft female.

After opting to call the page ‘Ho, you’ve struck your last blow,’ I was somewhat disappointed to find that it only had one ‘like’ – my own – and that the only comment was from Mother telling me to stop being so silly. It seemed I had grossly misread the situation, with my assumption that social media’s influence was all-powerful and the most effective rabble-rousing tool in today’s society apparently well wide of the mark.

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Vaguely Interesting Snippets | 21 April – 27 April 2012  

• According to the BBC’s QI, a swarm of gnats is called a “ghost”. In addition, the word ‘lemur’ means ‘ghost’. It was coined by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) from the Latin, Lemures: ‘the shades of the departed’.
• The Perthshire village of Dull is attempting to forge civic links with the Oregan town of Boring.
• The Ford factory complex at Dagenham covers 475 acres (about 260 full size football (soccer) pitches). Between 1933 and 2003 a Ford Ferry service brought workers over the Thames from South London.
• Frog Island, Rainham, London was allegedly named after its use as a prisoner camp during the Napoleonic wars. It is not actually an island.

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