Faynights

Pssst...

2007-02-13T23:51:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I've been able to focus on anything in time to post on this blog, but as it's the Brit Awards tomorrow I've snuck in some of my own personal awards for last year's recordings over on the Hit Parade blog. Enjoy!

You've been sleighed

2006-12-03T16:28:00.000+01:00

It seems like a date that ought to be marked somehow - last night, the Second of December 2006, in an act of desperation I tuned the kitchen radio to Virgin. And for the first time this year I heard 'Merry Xmas Everybody' by Slade. It's almost like an annual rite of passage isn't it?

Every minute of every hour, I love a sunflower

2006-10-06T22:11:00.000+01:00

Hi folks, sorry it's been a bit quiet lately. So there's something new this month, I thought I'd experiment with photoblogging: here are a couple of snaps I took near work a couple of weeks ago. I've attempted to crop them so as to protect the privacy of the people who live in the houses.

Ideally, I suppose I should have started taking photos in the summer when the flowers are in fuller bloom; but then I suppose ideally I should have known what I was doing.

And here's a picture of a calf we saw in the New Forest. Aaah.

There will be no white flag above my door

2006-08-31T22:56:00.000+01:00

I meant to mention a while ago something I'd seen recently as part of the bloom of St. George's Crosses during the World Cup. One, probably intended for a car but seen sitting on a garage, bore the name of a well-known manufacturer of glue products in one of the white squares. You know, in a lot of countries people would find it offensive to do that to their flag.

The other morning I saw it in the gutter. It had probably been blown there by high winds, but it caught my eye precisely because it hadn't occured to anyone to remove it from there. Myself included actually; and for all that "English" isn't the first word I think of to describe myself, it's odd that it had no effect on me. It only struck me as something I could mention to Laura as a counterpoint to her experiences in the US and as an amusing point to make on the blog. Strange nation, we are.

A Girardian interpretation of Genesis 22:1-14

2006-08-20T23:23:00.000+01:00

(This is one of the essays I wrote for my Hebrew class last term.)

The thought of the French philosopher René Girard 1 provides an interesting context in which to read the story of Abraham and Isaac. Girard believes that sacrificial rituals arise when uncontrolled violence threatens to destroy a society. The usual way for a community to survive this crisis is for the violence to become focused on a particular victim, or scapegoat; a real or imagined transgression is usually cited to justify the victim’s selection, but the choice is in fact arbitrary. Once the victim is destroyed, peace is temporarily restored. The people therefore believe this violence to be divinely sanctioned; they establish rituals that re-enact the “founding murder” and develop a mythology that justifies it.

This sacrificial mechanism, however, can work only if participants do not understand what is really going on. Girard believes that the Judaeo-Christian scriptures chip away at the myths of violence to reveal the inner workings of scapegoating and sacrifice and so destroy them. This process begins in the first books of the Old Testament and gradually becomes more radical until it reaches its conclusion in the Gospels.2

Genesis 22 retains some characteristics of primitive sacrificial myths, but at heart it is very different -- and not just because of its surprise ending. A number of elements in the text subvert the sacrificial theme and show that the story is not simply part of the usual cycle of violence.

The difference begins when Isaac is named as victim. The victim in a sacrificial myth is generally depicted as having done something to deserve his fate; Isaac is not shown to have done anything at all. Indeed, it may be to emphasise his innocence that the author depicts him as if he were a young child, even though the timescale of Genesis suggests he would have been an adult.3 Girard believes that this acknowledgement of the victim‘s innocence is the first step in dismantling the sacrificial process: “The true ‘scapegoats‘ are those whom men have never recognised as such, in whose guilt they have an unshaken belief.” 4

As Abraham prepares to kill Isaac, the language used is not that of ritual but that of butchery. In his translation of the Pentateuch, Robert Alter points out that the word מאכלת, which is used throughout for the knife, usually refers to a cleaver used in butchering rather than a weapon used for sacrifice. Likewise, עקד (verse 9), while it does not appear elsewhere in the Old Testament, is used in rabbinic Hebrew to mean trussing the legs of animals, and שחט (verse 10) means not “sacrifice” but “slaughter.” 5 It is difficult to see the attempted killing as having the dignity of a divinely approved ritual when this brutal vocabulary is used.

Another very significant change in vocabulary occurs when the angel saves Isaac. Up to this point, the word used for God has been אלהים. While often used in the Old Testament to mean the God of Israel, this is really a generic term that can refer to any god or goddess. Only when Isaac is rescued does the true name of God -- יהוה, “the Eternal” -- appear in the text. The Girardian scholar Paul Nuechterlein believes that this change holds the key to the story:

Very important to a Girardian reading of this crucial passage is the idea that the God at the beginning of the passage who demands the sacrifice from Abraham is a different God from the one at the end who stops it. … Is this story trying to sort out the gods? Abraham begins hearing the common tribal gods of ancient polytheism who demand human sacrifices. On the mount of Yahweh-yireh, however, he begins to hear and envision the one true God who wants us to stop that nonsense. 6

This is not to say that a pagan god literally speaks to Abraham. It seems likely that Abraham starts by acting upon his own conception of God, the one men have made in their own image as part of their cycle of violence. Only when the true God, the Eternal, intervenes will Abraham begin to realise how wrong this conception is.

After Isaac is spared, Abraham sacrifices a ram in his place. To modern eyes, this, while undoubtedly preferable to child sacrifice, hardly marks the beginning of a kind and enlightened era. It is notable, however, that God does not ask for the ram to be sacrificed: Abraham merely sees it and assumes that it is to be killed. It is as if, now that the crisis has reached this point, it is impossible to leave without shedding blood of some kind.

We must also consider what sort of animal is being slaughtered. When Abraham and Isaac were discussing an alternative victim for the sacrifice, they assumed it would be a sheep (שה) -- a passive and neutral animal 7 that was bred for the purpose of sacrifice. A wild ram (איל) is a very different creature!

How did the ram come to be caught by its horns? This sort of accident is not uncommon among wild hoofed mammals during the battles of mating season. It usually happens either when the animal is ‘horning’ vegetation to intimidate a rival, or as it charges in a blind rage. An animal caught this way is doomed: it will either be killed by a predator or starve. 8 Could it be that the ram appears in the story, not to provide Abraham with a “surrogate victim" 9, but as another warning of the destructive effects of rivalry and violence?

Abraham chooses a telling name for the mountain: not “the Eternal spared my son,” but “the Eternal sees.” The Eternal does see, but man does not quite yet. There will be many more victims to come in our story; but something has already changed. The revelation on the mountain is just the start of a process that will reveal the truth about God to man.

1 The most thorough account of Girard’s theories on sacrifice is given in his 1972 book Violence and the Sacred. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, published in 1978, considers his theories in relation to scripture.
2 Things Hidden, pp. 141-144, 157-158. Girard does believe, however, that many Christians have given the Gospels a “sacrificial interpretation” that defeats their true purpose.
3 Most of what I say about Isaac here can also be said of Ishmael in the preceding chapter of Genesis.
4 Things Hidden, pp. 46-47.
5 Alter, p. 107.
6 The Girardian Lectionary, “Proper 8A."
7 The Hebrew word literally means “one of a flock.”
8 In her classic account of the wildlife of the American Southwest, The Land of Little Rain, Mary Austin describes finding the skeleton of a young ram with its horns still embedded in the trunk of a tree (p. 58). And Richard Despard Estes, an expert on the hoofed mammals of Africa, tells a true story that could just as well serve as a parable. Two fighting springboks found their horns inextricably locked; each spent the rest of its life face to face with its rival as they starved to death together (African Mammals, p. 83).
9 See Violence and the Sacred, pp. 101-103.

Works cited

Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004.
Austin, Mary. The Land of Little Rain. New York: Dover Publications, 1996 (first published 1903).
Estes, Richard D. The Behavior Guide to African Mammals. London: University of California Press, 1991.
Girard, René. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. London: Continuum, 2003 (originally published in French, 1978).
Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. London: The Athlone Press, 1988 (originally published in French, 1972).
Nuechterlein, Paul. “Proper 8A,” The Girardian Lectionary. Published on the Internet June 27, 2005; accessed March 27, 2006. .

Genesis 22:1-14

2006-08-20T23:12:00.000+01:00

And it happened after these things that a god tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham.” And he said, “Here I am,” And he said, “Please take your son, your only son whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him up there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will tell you.” And Abraham rose early in the morning and bridled his donkey and took two young men of his and Isaac his son, and chopped wood for the sacrifice, and got up and went to the place the god had told him. And on the third day Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the place from a distance. And Abraham said to the young men, “Sit down here with the donkey, and I and the youth will go upon this place and worship, and we will return to you.” And Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on Isaac his son, and he took the flame in his hand and the cleaver, and the two of them went as one. And Isaac spoke to Abraham, his father, and said, “My father.” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” And he said, “Here is the flame and the wood, but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?” And Abraham said, “God himself will see to the sheep for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went as one. And they came to the place that the god had told him, and there Abraham built an altar. And he set the wood in order and trussed Isaac his son and put him on the altar above the wood. And Abraham put out his hand and took the cleaver to slaughter his son. And a messenger from the Eternal called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham,” and he said, “Here I am.” And he said, “Do not stretch out your hand against the youth, and do not do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, for you did not withhold your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham raised his eyes and saw, and behold! a ram behind, caught in a thicket by its horns, and Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. And Abraham called the name of that place “The Eternal sees,” as it is said to this day, “On the mountain the Eternal has been seen.”

(my translation)

So oddly interrupted

2006-08-20T22:51:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the long, long silence on my part, but real life caught up with me unexpectedly. A few of the things I have been doing since March:

I completed my diploma in Religious Studies (with an emphasis on Biblical languages) at Birkbeck College. Now I just need to work out what to do with it. My last class involved writing several long papers; I'll try to post the less embarrassing of these here.
I spent a couple of months writing a poem for BBC Wildlife Magazine's Wildlife Poet of the Year competition. I hadn't written a poem for many years, but enjoyed this one enough to think I ought to do it more often. It appears that my entry didn't win anything. But I still maintain that it is the best sonnet ever written about the reproductive cycle of moss.
Some stuff was going on at work that I can't talk about in detail, but that has now been resolved (favourably, I'm glad to say).
Most recently, I've embarked on a project to read all the books on my "to be read" shelves before the next influx of books comes in at Christmas. I had nearly 80 to read when I started, and am now down to 48 (though admittedly I took a few books to the charity shop without finishing them when I decided they weren't worth struggling through). I've just started Keats and Embarrassment by Christopher Ricks, which is interesting if not wholly convincing. (I bought my copy used, and it appears that the previous owner was not impressed, having written "JESUS WEPT!" in several places in the margin.)

I can't predict when regular posts will resume, but will try to pop in now and then to confirm that I'm still alive. I'm sure Chris will keep you entertained in the meantime.

But there's no reason to cry

2006-08-02T23:16:00.000+01:00

In recent years there haven't been a lot of reasons to praise the world's record companies. So I thought it was only fair to give some public recognition to Lo-Max Records, the label that released the final Go-Betweens album I mentioned in a previous post. After complaints about the sound quality on the original CD, they not only remastered the album but kindly offered to exchange the discs for those of us who bought the original version at no charge. I got mine by return of post too. How many other labels would do that for you?

One good turn deserves another, so here's a plug: if you haven't got the album at all, you can obtain it in the usual places, or Lo-Max's online shop.

How should I feel?

2006-07-09T16:14:00.000+01:00

You know, it's not really my place to fuss about the withdrawl of Top Of The Pops, especially not several weeks too late. But it is my place to be a pedant, so let's have a quick look at this response from the usually trustworthy Economist. It's not that I always agree with their position on an issue, but the level of research is impressive. So how did some of this slip through?

FOR a comparatively young genre, pop music is suspiciously full of “historic” moments. But the announcement on June 20th that the BBC was to cancel Top of the Pops (ToTP), a weekly tour of the singles chart that has been broadcast since 1964, surely qualifies. The programme itself was embarrassingly naff: presenters often seemed bemused by the bands; many acts refused to perform, objecting to the requirement to mime along to a pre-recorded track; and skimpily clad dancers were a main attraction. Nevertheless, at the height of its popularity in the 1970s, 15m people tuned in each week.

A fair start, there, although I'm not sure how many acts really did refuse to show up - the Clash are the obvious ones, and New Order refused until they were finally permitted to attempt a live 'Blue Monday' - and over the years the programme did have dalliances with a no-miming policy which proved less than succesful. There's no question that the naffest incarnation of the show was also the most popular. There follows a reasonable reference to the alternative outlets for musis in the multi-channel world, but then it goes a bit wrong:

More recent is the rise of the internet, which has made finding new music even easier. In March Britain made musical history when an American band named Gnarls Barkley reached the top of the singles chart before its song was available in shops. For the first time anywhere, a song had been propelled to the top spot entirely by internet downloads.

Anywhere?
But let's overlook that question and get to the actual point here. It's true that Gnarls Barkley (actually a duo, but that's fair enough) reached the top of the singles chart on download sales alone before the single was released in the UK - but the fact that they were the first is not necessarily unconnected to the fact that a change in chart rules a few weeks previously had allowed download sales to be counted the week before physical release; had they sold as many downloads three weeks earlier it would have made no difference. In fact, sales of the record increased when the CD single appeared, with even its download sales more than doubling (presumably as a result of the publicity). What really matters though is why people were downloading it - they may have had a slightly novel way of purchasing it but the reasons were the same as always: it was a huge radio hit. Furthermore:

Sandi Thom, a Scottish singer, recently signed a £1m contract with Sony after tens of thousands of internet users watched her play live “concerts” from the basement of her Tooting flat. (Some think her success was masterminded by Sony from the start.)

Actually, more of us think her manager orchestrated it. But again, that doesn't really matter because for the bulk of its history, TotP refused to feature a record until it had entered the chart, and they wouldn't repeat it unless it was Number One or had increased its sales by a certain amount. Under modern industry conditions that would be more difficult, which may well be why the rules were abandoned some years ago, but the fact remains that it's never been the job of the programme to find the hits, even though it was a valuable promotional tool once upon a time. It was supposed to report the hits that were already happening, by whatever means. Personally, breaking that link was one of the things that put me off the programme around the turn of the century (that and age of course) because it began to lack a real raison d'etre when the big stars could waltz straight on to it with a performance they'd taped months in advance. By the time they were desperate enough to combine it with TOTP2, thus interspersing new and old performances to avoid satisfying anybody, it seemed to become a waste of time and the writing was really on the wall. I'm still a little grudging in admitting this, but if it really couldn't survive in its original form it's better off being put out of its misery.

The better news is that, for the time being at least, the website is staying up. I've been enjoying their Blog Party archives, and there are a few brief clips of performances through the ages. New Order? They ended up miming 'Regret' on a beach.

Watching the wheels go round and round...

2006-06-18T17:43:00.000+01:00

Somehow, it seems like I've been too busy reading other people's blogs to add anything to my own lately. I'm still around though, so maybe it's time for a few little updates on what's happened in the last couple of months. In no particular order:

The Perishers ends six months after the demise of Maurice Dodd. It seems only right not to continue the strip without him, especially as it wasn't at its best towards the end, but it's a pity that it faded away like this, with all the books long out of print.

Grant McLennan, co-founder of The Go-Betweens, died in early May. It was barely a year since the release of the album Oceans Apart, one of their finest. You can read an obituary at No Rock & Roll Fun or check out Sweeping The Nation's guide.

George Bush did something stupid. I didn't actually need to check that bit.

England have managed to score some goals.

And on a self-promoting note, the Hit Parade Blog has now entered the Top 30.

Strawberries everywhere!

2006-04-02T14:01:00.000+01:00

I thought it unwise to post yesterday (who'd believe me?), but there's room for a little Dentists update. Last Thursday I finally managed to buy myself the Rev-Ola CD of Some People Are On the Pitch... from Sister Ray in London. You can look at my original post, but when I went back to the website I discovered that it had moved to a new location with its own domain. Also, Mark Matthews has created the inevitable Dentists MySpace, where you too can hear a slightly random selection of their tracks.

It's a long time since I heard 'Strawberries Are Growing In My Garden (And It's Wintertime)' actually played at the correct speed. I've also been able to add the complete album to the Faynights station over at Yahoo for anyone that curious about our musical tastes.

Culture shock

2006-03-18T15:33:00.000+01:00

Well, I did promise I was going to report back on my slightly cultured week off didn't I?

Among other things, we visited the National Gallery's Americans In Paris exhibition, a major examination of the many artists who moved from the USA to France in the late nineteenth century. Those familiar with my level of expertise in art history may not be surprised to learn that I entered the first room thinking "Who's that guy who looks like Dave Lee Travis?"

It proves to have been Carolus-Duran, painted by his pupil John Singer Sargeant (whose notorious Madame X is the centrepiece of the exhibition). He does rather have the look of a man who's a bit fed up with people saying they used to watch him presenting Top of the Pops.

You be the judge:

This illustration is one of many shots from Radio 1's 25th Anniversary brochure helpfully archived at Aircheck Museum. Why not check out the selection of gorgeous pouting DJ publicity photos from the early 1990s, and wonder why we were laughing at 70s design back then?

The exhibition was very good by the way.
The Royal Academy's China: The Three Emperors doesn't come cheap but does contain some impressive works not often seen in Europe; there are some especially impressive scrolls, and a cute picture of some rabbits (sadly not on the website, but it made for a very welcome birthday card).
Also getting the Faynights seal of approval was the Wildlife Photographer Of The Year display at the Natural History Museum. We took the opportunity to revisit the Lawrence Of Arabia exhibit at the Imperial War Museum too, which still has a few weeks to run.

A penny from Heaven?

2006-03-16T22:12:00.000+01:00

Hello everyone. We're back from our week off (of which more later, perhaps) but while it's on my mind I had another enjoyable Radio 4 moment this morning. The Man Who Made Frank Swing is possibly not the best title in broadcasting history; but the programme itself, an examination of the collaboaration between a certain Mr Sinatra and the arranger Nelson Riddle was a little gem, all the better for my having had no idea it was going to be on.

Worth a Listen Again, even if only for the musical excerpts (although you really should have a copy of Songs For Swingin' Lovers anyway) and best of all if I put this on the blog, I don't have to remember to tell Laura it was on.

Signal failure

2006-02-28T07:58:00.000+01:00

It's a common belief among leftist groups in Britain that if they spend enough time slagging off America, they don't have to offer any constructive ideas to help their own country. This explains why, when I checked the web site of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union yesterday to find out whether a threatened Tube strike was going ahead, I didn't see any information about whether I would be able to get to class on Thursday. Instead, I saw a poll asking, 'Should the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay be closed?' Clearly, once the RMT knows the will of its members, it's going to use its clout with the Bush Administration -- which ranks only slightly behind that of, say, the American Orchid Society.

Much as I despise Gitmo, I'm tempted to vote 'no' on this poll just to see if such heresy reduces the union's site to a jumble of code as creaky and juddering as the trains its members have to drive.

Don Knotts RIP

2006-02-26T20:05:00.000+01:00

If the West Virginia flag isn't at half staff, it should be.

Topping stuff

2006-02-24T20:13:00.000+01:00

One of the first pages I turn to in The Economist is the obituary. Although the paper gives the expected attention to deceased presidents and Nobel-Prize winners, it's just as likely to celebrate lesser-known but fascinating lives that I might never have known about otherwise. Such is the case with this week's obituary of Robert Rich, the inventor of frozen non-dairy topping. (He later expanded into other dairy substitutes -- his name provided the 'Rich' in Coffee Rich --and the company he founded is still going.) In addition to telling the surprisingly fraught history of Rich's invention -- Ford refused to provide the equipment to make it because 'they sold a lot of tractors to dairy farmers' -- the article informed me of the existence of the Frozen Food Hall of Fame, which is apparently maintained by the 'Distinguished Order of Zerocrats'.

Smoke gets in your eyes

2006-02-14T20:10:00.000+01:00

Chris got me The Rough Guide to Frank Sinatra for Valentine's Day. Leafing through the Albums section, I was struck by how variable the cover art was, especially in the '40s and '50s. The covers range from images that are still cool and evocative today to those that are downright embarrassing. After studying them, I've been able to determine a general rule: The covers that show Sinatra with a cigarette are good, whereas those where he's fagless are, well, not. Judge for yourself:

Strangely, Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely won a Grammy for best cover design, which goes to show how tastes can change.

The Economist on Mohammed cartoons

2006-02-10T23:17:00.000+01:00

“I DISAGREE with what you say and even if you are threatened with death I will not defend very strongly your right to say it.” That, with apologies to Voltaire, seems to have been the initial pathetic response of some western governments to the republication by many European newspapers of several cartoons of Muhammad first published in a Danish newspaper in September.

Read the whole thing.

Swing sets for grown-ups

2006-02-08T20:00:00.000+01:00

Now this is a gym I wouldn't mind visiting. I wonder if they have those teeter-totter swings?

'Lost world' found in Indonesia

2006-02-07T18:46:00.000+01:00

Exciting news from The Washington Post:

Scientists exploring an isolated jungle in one of Indonesia's most remote provinces discovered dozens of new species of frogs, butterflies and plants _ as well as mammals hunted to near extinction elsewhere, members of the expedition said Tuesday.

The team also found wildlife that were remarkably unafraid of humans during its rapid survey of the Foja Mountains, an area in eastern Indonesia's Papua province with more than two million acres of old growth tropical forest, said Bruce Beehler, a co-leader of the monthlong trip.

Two Long-beaked Echidnas, a primitive egg-laying mammal, simply allowed scientists to pick them up and bring them back to their camp to be studied, he said.

The December expedition to Papua on the western side of New Guinea island was organized by the U.S.-based environmental organization Conservation International and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

Papua, the scene of a decades-long separatist rebellion that has killed an estimated 100,000 people, is one of Indonesia's most remote provinces, geographically and politically, and access by foreigners is tightly restricted.

The 11-member team of U.S., Indonesian and Australian scientists needed six permits before they could legally fly by helicopter to an open, boggy lakebed surrounded by forests near the range's western summit.

The scientists said they discovered 20 frog species _ including a tiny microhylid frog less than a half inch long _ four new butterfly species and at least five new types of palms.

One of the most remarkable discoveries was the Golden-mantled Tree Kangaroo, an arboreal jungle-dweller new for Indonesia and previously thought to have been hunted to near extinction, and a new honeyeater bird, which has a bright orange face-patch with a pendant wattle under each eye, Beehler said.

The scientists also took the first known photographs of Berlepsch's Six-wired Bird of Paradise, a bird described by hunters in New Guinea in the 19th century and named for the wires that extend from its head in place of a crest.

One of the reasons for the rain forest's isolation, Beehler said, was that only a few hundred people live in the region and game in the mountain's foothills is so abundant that they had no reason to venture into the jungle's interior.

There did not appear to be any immediate conservation threat to the area, which has the status of a wildlife sanctuary, he said.

"No logging permits are given to this area, there is no transport system _ not a single road," Beehler said.

"But clearly with time everything is a threat. In the next few decades there will be strong demands, especially if you think of the timber needs of nearby countries like China and Japan. They will be very hungry for logs."

It's amazing that discoveries like this are still being made today; it makes me think about how much more there must be that we don't yet know about. I just hope that this unique ecosystem will be treated better by humans than previously discovered ones have.

Bruce Beehler has published a first-person account of the trip in The Independent, and the paper's main article has more details on the species his team found. The BBC has lots of pictures of the new discoveries. Conservation International's site is here; this seems to be the Indonesian Institute of Sciences' site, but it's in Indonesian only.

Given, no. Spilt, yes

2006-02-06T18:25:00.001+01:00

This morning's Today programme had an interview with a student leader from Birmingham University, whose organisation is protesting the National Blood Service's policy on gay donors. (You can hear it here for the next few days; the link goes to a .ram file.) Under the current rules, no man who has ever had sex with another man is permitted to give blood. I agree that this rule should be reviewed, not because it violates anyone's 'right' to give blood -- there is no such right -- but because it keeps out a lot of potential donors who don't really pose a serious HIV risk.

The student interviewed on the Today programme, however, didn't use that argument, or any other logical argument. Instead, he told an anecdote that had my bullshit detector clanging:

The way I came to find out about this was because a friend of mine went to give blood with their dad, and they weren't out at the time, and, uh, out to their parents, and they realised that they couldn't give blood, and they didn't realise how they could tell, you know, hadn't told their parents beforehand, this really wasn't the time, in the queue to give blood, and so they had to, when they saw the needle, pretend to faint, which meant they ended up hitting their head on a bed and, and actually knocking themselves out. Which is, you know, a real risk for them.

I give blood myself, and I find this story highly unlikely. The Blood Service's procedure is to interview you privately at every appointment. In a curtained booth, a nurse goes through each item on the health questionnaire and asks you to confirm your answer. They do this precisely because they realise you might have had someone looking over your shoulder when you filled it out. All the student had to do was to tell the nurse he was gay. The information would never have gone beyond the interview booth -- and since the nurse tests your iron levels at the same time as the interview, the student could have told his father he couldn't donate because his iron was too low. In short, if the donation session was run properly, there was no way the homophobic tyranny of Billy Blood Drop could have forced this guy to fall down and get an owie.

So what does the anecdote prove? Well, it could prove that someone is lying or mistaken. It could prove that a particular blood donation session was run without due regard for privacy. It could prove that the student was naive and panicked, or that he had a martyr complex and set out to make things difficult for himself. The one thing it doesn't prove is that gay men should be allowed to give blood. And considering that there are valid arguments to support the idea that they should, I'm baffled that the students chose to rely on this feeble appeal to pity.

Brokeback Mountain

2006-02-05T15:43:00.000+01:00

Warning: This post contains serious spoilers for both the film and the story. Enjoy some nice pictures from the Dover Sampler while those affected leave the post.

I find cinemas -- with the possible exception of the National Film Theatre -- to be intensely depressing, so I have to have a much stronger than usual interest in a film before I will venture into one. Fortunately, I was willing to do so for Brokeback Mountain. I read Annie Proulx's story a few months ago (thanks to Language Hat, though sadly his link no longer works), and consider it to be one of the best short stories I've read from the past few decades. I wondered whether the film could do it justice.

For the most part, I think it does. The film necessarily had to portray events that were only reported in dialogue in the story, and invent new ones for periods that the story passed over in silence, but this was done in a way that preserved the melancholy and reflective tone of Proulx's story. I was especially curious about how the movie would handle the ambiguity surrounding Jack's death; the problem was solved rather elegantly with a brief flashback that could have been either imagination or reality.

The one part of the movie that didn't work for me was the sub-plot about Ennis's elder daughter. It was an invention of the screenwriters -- in the story, Ennis doesn't see his daughters again after the Thanksgiving confrontation with his ex-wife -- and I got the impression that they'd added it to mitigate Proulx's utterly bleak ending with very faint ray of hope. In the film's closing scene, Ennis's daughter visits to invite him to her wedding; after first saying he will be too busy with work, he changes his mind and agrees to come. After his daughter leaves, he puts her sweater in his closet, looks at the two shirts and postcard he has hung inside the door and says with tears in his eyes, 'Jack, I swear --' He doesn't finish the sentence, but it seems he's vowing not to pass up any more chances for human closeness in his life.

Ennis delivers the same line in Proulx's story, but the setting and the effect are very different. When he hangs the shirts and postcard, he is utterly alone. He begins to cry, perhaps for the first time since Jack's death. And then he says, 'Jack, I swear --' and stops, because he realises there's nothing he can swear any more. In the film, the line is moving; in the story, it's devastating.

Well, Hollywood can never resist a happy ending, and this is a minor flaw in an otherwise excellent film. Not only was it worth entering a cinema, it was worth the bus journey to Watford (and believe me, that's saying a lot).

Happy Day of Anger!

2006-02-03T08:24:00.000+01:00

Sorry for the gap in posts; we've been busy with a number of projects both on- and offline. While you're waiting, have a look at these cartoons, and think about how important it is that you still can.

(Via L'Ombre de l'Olivier.)

Boycott Google?

2006-01-25T09:11:00.000+01:00

I was very disappointed to learn that Google has agreed to censor its search results in China. So disappointed, in fact, that I'd like to send the company a message. The first option that comes to mind is a boycott of Google and its subsidiaries.

That's easier said than done. It would mean not just moving this blog (Google owns Blogger), but changing the way I search, read news, follow Usenet, send e-mail -- in fact, the vast majority of what I do online. The problem is that whenever I try an alternative to Google, it turns out not to be much good. And when I do find a non-Google service I like, it seems Google soon pops up and buys it. (I'm expecting bids for Wikipedia and LibraryThing any day now.) Furthermore, I have no guarantee that any other company would have cleaner hands. As the Reuters story I linked to above notes:

The voluntary concessions laid out on Tuesday by Google, which is launching a China-based search site as it officially enters the market, would parallel similar self-censorship already practised there by most multinationals and domestic players.

Homegrown giants like Sohu.com Inc. and Baidu.com Inc., along with China sites operated by Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft, all routinely block searches on politically sensitive terms such as the Falun Gong spiritual movement and Taiwan independence.

The company added that at least for now, it will stay away from e-mail and blogging in China, which have been the source of recent controversies after Beijing demanded information on an e-mail user from Yahoo, and Microsoft pulled down a politically sensitive posting from its China-based blog service.

A more important question is whether a boycott of Google would actually work. To be effective, any protest would need to cost the company more than it stands to gain from the China deal. Would that happen if a couple of non-paying users stopped using it? If 10,000 did?

Perhaps those best placed to change Google's mind are the company's shareholders. After all, at its initial public offering Google promised them 'not to be evil.' I think they have a right to feel ripped off.

More OED fun

2006-01-23T22:32:00.000+01:00

The OED's periods of free access continue to be a fascinating source of information. I'd recently encountered the word elsewhen on a LibraryThing profile and thought it was a delightful neologism -- turns out it actually dates back to 1418. What's more, it was part of a whole clan of now-forgotten cousins, including elsewhat (first recorded in AD 840), elsewhither (1000), elsewho (1542), elsewise (1548) and elsehow (1666). In a similar vein, prepone -- the opposite of postpone -- turns out not to be a recent invention of Indian English; it was first used in its current sense in 1941, and had been used with the meaning 'to set before' as long ago as 1549. I was also pleased to find ramp, the West Virginian word for a very pungent kind of wild onion; I'd never seen it in a dictionary before.

Because I've been doing some research into the history of the song 'The Lady is a Tramp' (more on that later), I was curious as to when tramp was first used to mean 'loose woman'. It turns out the first written example is from 1922, which fits in with what I had in mind.

Much more of this, and I may end up having to buy a subscription -- which, of course, was probably the promoters' plan all along ...

Happiness

2006-01-14T21:51:00.000+01:00

Those only are happy ... who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness: on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

Potto update!

2006-01-12T22:53:00.000+01:00

The pottos (see entries passim) have finally been definitively located. They've been moved to Marwell Zoological Park in Winchester, which has close links with London Zoo. The keepers don't know yet whether the pottos will return to London when the refurbishment is done, but they've promised to let me know.

My thanks to the staff at London Zoo for their friendly and helpful responses.

Pottos, redux

2006-01-09T21:36:00.000+01:00

Two mini-mysteries solved this evening. First, it transpires that while London Zoo's pottos are indeed still in the zoo, they're not going to be on display to the public while their new home is built. Clearly, I must move to Cleveland, or else donate £500 for a private visit.

Seriously, if animals can be cared for better behind the scenes, then that's where they should be. The zoo did offer to let me adopt another animal instead, but I'd rather keep supporting the pottos because, well, they're just special. I'll also continue to bring you potto news from around the world, so keep checking back every hour or so.

Secondly, as promised, here's what the OED has to say about redux:

[L., f. redcre to bring back, REDUCE.]

1. Path. Of crepitation or other physical signs: indicating the return of an organ to a healthy state.

1898 Allbutt's Syst. Med. V. 99 The ‘redux’ crepitation is sometimes indistinguishable from that of pulmonary hæmorrhage. Ibid. 360 Friction sound, indicative of restored contact between the pleural surfaces, redux friction as it is usually called.

2. Brought back, restored.

[1662 DRYDEN (title) Astraea Redux. A poem on the happy restoration and return of His Sacred Majesty.] 1873 TROLLOPE (title) Phineas redux. 1971 J. UPDIKE (title) Rabbit redux.

I'd never heard of the first, medical definition, but the second definition suggests that my theory about how the word entered common usage is correct.

And as a tribute to our friends in seclusion, here's the OED's entry for potto:

[Alleged to be from a Guinea dialect (see quot. 1705); cf. Ashanti aps(s)o. (See J. Platt in N. & Q. 10th ser. IV. 286.)]

1. A West African lemur (Perodicticus potto), commonly called a ‘sloth’. Also potto lemur. b. Calabar potto, a species of lemur (Arctocebus calabarensis), inhabiting the district of Old Calabar.

1705 tr. Bosman's Guinea 250 A Creature, by the Negroes called Potto [orig. een beest, 'tgeen by de negers de naem van potto draegt], but known to us by the Name of Sluggard. 1868 OWEN Vertebr. Anim. III. 405 In the Potto the sub~maxillary ducts open in the usual position, upon the free margin of the sublingual. 1901 Q. Rev. July 18 That most typical West African creature, the potto lemur. 1902 Westm. Gaz. 28 May 12/1 To a weird-looking and nocturnal creature with the eyes of a cat and the body of a tailless monkey the name of ‘Bosman's Potto’ has been given. 1906 SIR H. JOHNSTON Liberia 685 The range of the common potto extends right across Africa from Sierra Leone to Uganda.

2. The kinkajou. Also potto kinkajou.

1790 T. BEWICK Quadrupeds (1824) 446 One of this species [Yellow Macauco] was shewn in London some years ago, and was said to have been brought from Jamaica, where it is called the Potto. 1834 MCMURTRIE Cuvier's Anim. Kingd. I. 84 This is, perhaps, the only proper place for the singular genus of the Kinkajous or Potto... From the warm parts of America, and from some of the great Antilles, where it is called Potto. 1855 H. G. DALTON Brit. Guiana II. 456 The Potto-kinkajou, size of a pole-cat, a pretty looking animal, is occasionally seen.

(Although not closely related to the true potto, the kinkajou is a pretty neat little creature too.)

And you thought fried Mars bars were bad

2006-01-07T12:40:00.000+01:00

Like many regional delicacies, West Virginia's pepperoni roll is best enjoyed by putting all thoughts of your waistline or arteries out of your head. But now a pair of pizzeria owners in Chesapeake, Ohio (just over the river from Huntington, W.Va.) have gone too far. Their new menu includes the 'pepperoni zinger' -- a pepperoni roll, deep-fried. I'd be interested in comments from readers who have tried this, if you're still in any condition to make them.

Redux redux

2006-01-05T23:24:00.000+01:00

Making my usual ill-founded attempt to be clever, I titled my last post Mirabilis redux. See what I did there? Mirabilis is a Latin word (meaning 'wonderful' or 'astonishing,' as Christine explains), so I thought I'd throw in a bit more Latin to go with it.

I admit that I know next to nothing about Latin (I've never studied it, using the excuse that I was in too love with Greek to give it proper attention), but I was pretty sure redux was a Latin word that had been assimilated intact into English. So I was puzzled not to find it in any of the dictionaries or 'glossaries of common foreign phrases' in our house, and I was downright gobsmacked to check Wiktionary and find it described as 'a slang term which seems to have circulated in the early 1990s. Origin unknown.'

But wait! If that's true, what was John Dryden doing writing a poem called Astrea Redux in 1660? Or Anthony Trollope writing a novel called Phineas Redux in 1874? For that matter, what was John Updike doing writing Rabbit Redux in 1971? I decided to investigate further. I looked up redux in the University of Notre Dame's Latin dictionary and grammar aid, and there it was: 'Redux -ducis adj.: act. [bringing back , restoring]; pass. [brought back, returned].'

So the Wiktionary editor had no clue; that's hardly news. But the question remains: Why wasn't the word in any of our real-life dictionaries? Our dictionaries are a few decades old, so the fact that they don't include the word suggests that it wasn't used frequently in English until fairly recently. Searches online seem to bear this out: New dictionaries have the word, old dictionaries don't. (This guide from Lancaster University illustrates the up-to-dateness of one dictionary by noting that it includes redux, which the site's author describes as 'American English.')

My guess is that Dryden deliberately gave his poem a Latin title, that Trollope named his novel in imitation of Dryden, that Updike named his in imitation of one or the other, and that the word then became popular because of Updike's use.

I'll be able to test this theory next week, when the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary is briefly free as part of their tie-in with the BBC series Balderdash and Piffle. (Thanks, Language Hat!)

Mirabilis redux

2006-01-05T22:51:00.000+01:00

I'm pleased to see mirabilis.ca has returned after a long hiatus caused by technical problems. For those who haven't yet discovered this excellent blog, it covers a variety of interesting topics, but mainly archaeology and ancient history. Have a look!

A cruel joke

2006-01-04T16:54:00.000+01:00

I imagine many West Virginians were asleep in the early hours of this morning, and did not go through the emotions that people a few time zones ahead felt on their behalf. Like many Londoners, Chris and I woke to joyous news on our clock radio: All but one of the miners trapped in Upshur County had been recovered alive. Then three hours later, our elation turned to bewildered horror when we learned that it was a huge mistake, and that in fact, all but one of the miners had died. But what we felt, of course, does not even begin to approach what the miners' families felt and what they will feel for the rest of their lives.

A spokesman for International Coal Group oozed in front of the cameras to insist that the company never actually said the miners were alive, but he didn't explain why they allowed relatives to believe it for three hours. Likewise, the media seem so far to have avoided examining their consciences about how the false information spread.

It's too soon to tell whether anything could have been done to prevent the explosion, or to get the miners out before it was too late. But the mine's appalling safety record certainly suggests that ICG's practices should be looked at very closely. In addition to this, West Virginia needs to rethink the pitifully low penalties it applies for mine safety violations. At current rates, an unscrupulous operator could conclude that it was more cost-effective to pay the fines than to invest in its workers' safety.

The one redeeming feature of the Farmington No. 9 disaster, which killed 78 miners in 1968, was that it led to the federal Coal Mine Safety and Health Act. If the investigation into the Sago disaster leads to measures that make mining safer, then some good will have come out of a terrible event.

King Coal

2006-01-03T08:53:00.000+01:00

One thing about being a West Virginian living abroad is the feeling of utter surreality you get when places familiar to you from childhood make the international news. So it was last night when BBC radio's hourly news update included a story from Buckhannon.

The story of the trapped coal miners did not stay in the bulletins very long, since there hasn't been much progress and the Beeb presumably don't have a correspondent there. I had to go elsewhere on the web to learn that the company that runs the mine has a history of safety violations:

A coal mine where 13 miners were trapped after an explosion Monday was cited 208 times for alleged safety violations in 2005, up from just 68 citations the year before.

Federal regulators' allegations against the Sago Mine included failure to dilute coal dust, which can lead to explosions, and failure to properly operate and maintain machinery, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

Ninety-six of the citations were considered "significant and substantial" by inspectors.

Records from the Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Administration also show that Sago Mine has had 42 injuries since 2000 that resulted in lost work time.

Its injury rate per hours worked in 2004, the most recent year for such data, was nearly three times the national rate for a mine of its type. Eight injuries were reported that year.

The state Office of Miners' Health Safety & Training, which inspects underground mines four times each year, issued 144 notices of violation at Sago last year, compared to 74 in 2004, officials said.

The maximum fine the company could have paid for each citation? $250. Such is life under King Coal.

O potto, where art thou?

2006-01-02T12:29:00.000+01:00

Back in October, I posted that London Zoo's pottos would be staying in the zoo while the small mammal house was refurbished. With one thing and another, I didn't have a chance to visit for a few months, but finally went shortly before Christmas.

I was looking forward to seeing the pottos again, but was concerned not to find them in the former elephant house, where the small mammals are supposed to be. They weren't with the aye-ayes and lemurs either, nor in any of the other buildings we checked. The nice people at the animal adoption kiosk assured me they had been kept in London, and that as far as they knew they were meant to be on display in the elephant house. I double-checked: nothing, not even a placard, and the keepers in that building had never seen them.

I'm now waiting for the zoo to get back to me when they've found out the pottos' location. I know the little creatures don't like to draw attention to themselves, but on the other hand, they can't have got far ....

Honey be good

2006-01-01T23:11:00.000+01:00

One small pleasure I've discovered over the last couple of years is honeybush tea. I've not had much truck with herbal teas on the whole, finding that they flatter to deceive with their aromas, but this is something different; it lacks the caffeine and much of the tannin so I can drink it late in the evening, but still resembles conventional tea closely enough for a refusenik like me - in fact we even served it to some removal men once and they didn't spit on the carpet (sorry guys if you're reading this). Best of all, it doesn't smell of anything that it doesn't also taste of.

Recently I haven't been seeing any on the shelves though. I've done a little research online which suggests that it may simply be out of season, but what's been more interesting has been the story of its use to help the poor in the new South Africa.

The tea's apparently official site is not very detailed, but you can learn all you want to know (if not more) here. There are also some recipes (although the first one is just the recipe for tea, which seems too much like cheating) and even some South African Government regulations if you're truly curious. I think I'm supposed to end this post by saying something like "Cheers!".

Happy new year

2006-01-01T23:02:00.000+01:00

I almost downloaded 'New Year's Day' by U2 this morning. Instead, I've sort of resolved to celebrate 2006 by blogging more, and to this end I've started a whole side-blog, The Hit Parade, a sort of shadow Top 40 that hopes to highlight some overlooked hit singles. I've started at Number 40 with David McAlmont and will gradually work up (or down?) to a Number One single of my choice. All the tracks are drawn from my own collection, which also makes this a substitute for the currently-in-stasis Random Single Project.

I'll be posting on here more too, so there really is no escape. I hope everyone's enjoying the year so far.

Maurice Dodd RIP

2006-01-01T21:22:00.000+01:00

It probably won't make many headlines, but the remaining half of Britain's best-ever cartooning duo has died at the age of 83. Maurice Dodd wrote the dialogue for The Perishers, which was illustrated by Dennis Collins; after Collins died in the 1980s, Dodd began drawing the strip as well.

I'd like to think that Dodd's passing would be commemorated with the retrospective collection that the strip has always deserved, but from what I know of the Daily Mirror's current management I don't have great hope.

Dodd's family have provided an address for well-wishers on the Perishers website.

Y. Bhekhirst

2006-01-01T18:18:00.000+01:00

While exploring the outsider music category of Wikipedia, I recently found out about a very bizarre, yet somehow inescapably appealing, musician called Y. Bhekhirst (almost certainly not his real name). Sadly, I haven't been able to find a complete copy of his sole, cassette-only album Hot in the Airport -- it's allegedly distributed for download by theorchard.com, but none of their 'digital partners' appear to have it. However, there are several tracks available at unclekrinkly.com.

Until recently, information about Bhekhirst on the Web has been scanty and scattered over several sites. So I was delighted to find that Jonathan Benney has started a Bhekhirst home page that gathers together everything that is known about the man and his music, with the addition of Benney's own very thoughtful observations. I particularly like his summary of Bhekhirst's appeal:

My fascination with Y.'s music is that it is simultaneously addictive and repugnant. It's proof that music of any style or level of competence can be considered "catchy". It is also phenomenally irritating, almost disturbingly bizarre, and remarkably incompetent.

Another good site for information and theories about Bhekhirst is Phil S.'s weblog, Eyes that Can See in the Dark.

Calvin and Hobbes follow-up

2005-12-29T22:33:00.000+01:00

It seems that recently I've always been either too busy or too lazy to give our Complete Calvin and Hobbes a full inspection. But to those who have been wondering whether there are other altered strips besides the one I wrote about in September, I can now report that the answer is yes.

Memo to Santa

2005-12-20T22:08:00.000+01:00

Don't go to Washington this year. Send the polar bears instead.

Przewalski's horse returns

2005-12-19T23:34:00.000+01:00

Another species has been reclaimed from extinction, this time through human efforts. The Daily Telegraph reports:

A working group of scientists at London Zoo has now recommended that Przewalski's horse, previously characterised as "extinct" in the wild, should now be listed as "endangered".

It is a rare case of a species climbing away from extinction. If the new status is accepted by IUCN, the World Conservation Union, scientists say it will be a milestone for large mammal conservation.

In 1945, there were only 31 of Przewalski's horses in captivity, but by the early 1990s there were more than 1,500, and reintroductions began in their harsh native environment in Mongolia.

Przewalski's is the only true wild horse and is genetically dissimilar to the domestic horse, having a different number of chromosomes. It was discovered [presumably they mean 'described'] by a Russian, Col Nikolai Przewalski, in 1879.

It was hunted heavily by local people from the 17th century and its extinction in the wild came through further hunting at the end of the Second World War. The decline was exacerbated through agriculture in its natural habitat.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government announced that it would be spending $680,000 to expand a breeding centre for the horses.

There are lots of pictures and videos of these gorgeous animals at ARKive.

Orhan Pamuk

2005-12-16T18:50:00.000+01:00

Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's most famous novelist, appeared in court today to face charges of 'denigrating Turkishness and the republic.' The judge promptly halted the trial, however, and scheduled it to resume in early February pending a government review.

I had heard a lot about Pamuk's prosecution, which was sparked by an interview in which he held Turkey responsible for the Armenian genocide and the oppression of the Kurds. But I didn't realise that the law he was charged with violating had been passed four months after he made the remarks. Apparently this sort of ex post facto case requires approval from the Turkish justice ministry, and the prosecutors haven't got it yet. After court was adjourned, the minister of justice said it would take a long time to examine the file, then blamed the media for stirring things up.

I suspect the government is planning to let the case drop. This is no surprise, since the prosecution has provoked an international outcry and caused many foreign politicians to question Turkey's fitness to join the EU. Letting Pamuk off on a technicality would allow Turkey to get out of the mess without losing face. Unfortunately, it would also leave the wider issues unaddressed.

(On a personal level, all this has me thinking I should read Pamuk's Snow, which has been sitting on my 'to-be-read' shelf for a while now.)

Judges 11:1-3, 29-40

2005-12-14T22:45:00.000+01:00

And Jephthah the Gileadite was strong in strength. He was the son of a woman who was a whore, and Giled begot Jephthah. Giled’s wife also bore him sons, and the sons of the wife grew up and cast out Jephthah, saying to him, ‘You will not inherit in our father’s house, for you are the son of another woman.’ And Jephthah fled from the face of his brothers and settled in the land of Tov, and empty men flocked to him and went out with him. …

And a spirit of the Eternal came upon Jephthah, and he crossed through Gilead and Manasseh and past the watchtower of Gilead, and from the watchtower of Gilead he crossed over to the sons of Ammon. And Jephthah vowed a vow to the Eternal, saying ‘If you will indeed give the sons of Ammon into my hand, then [it will happen that] the one who comes forth from the doors of my house to greet me on my return in peace from the sons of Ammon will be the Eternal’s, and I will offer him up as a holocaust.’

And Jephthah crossed over to the sons of Ammon to fight with them, and the Eternal gave them into his hand. And he battered them from Aroer until you come to Minnith, twenty cities, and until Avil Kamim, (with) very great slaughter; and the sons of Ammon were humbled in the face of the sons of Israel.

And Jephthah came to the point overlooking his house, and behold, his daughter came out to greet him with timbrels and dances. She was his only one; he had no son or daughter besides her. And [it happened that] when he saw her, he tore his garment and said, ‘Ah, my daughter, you have brought me very low, and you have been the cause of my disturbance; I have opened my mouth to the Eternal, and I cannot go back.’

And she said to him, ‘My father, you have opened your mouth to the Eternal; do to me that which came forth from your mouth. After all, the Lord has made revenge for you upon your enemies, the sons of Ammon.’ And she said to her father, ‘Do this thing for me: leave me alone for two months so I can go and descend on the mountains and weep over my virginity, I and my friends.’

And he said, ‘Go.’ And he sent her away for two months, and she and her friends went and wept over her virginity on the mountains. And [it happened that] at the end of two months she went back to her father, and he carried out on her the vow that he had vowed. She had not known a man.

And it became prescribed in Israel. From that day to this, the daughters of Israel go to recall the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite for four days in the year.

(My translation)

Speak ye uncomfortably

2005-12-04T14:55:00.000+01:00

I'm a lector at my church, and the passage I had to read at Mass this morning was both easy and difficult. Easy, because it's one of the most famous and beautiful passages in the Old Testament: Isaiah 40:1-11, 'Comfort ye, comfort ye my people. ...' Unlike some of the drier paragraphs of St Paul, for example, you don't have to think about how to read this one expressively.

Yet it was difficult, because in the translation used by the Catholic Church in this country, it isn't 'Comfort ye, comfort ye my people' at all; it's 'Console my people, console them.' Although I try to concentrate on the sense rather than the sounds, it's hard not to choke on lines like 'Let every valley be filled in.' (As Barbara Grizzuti Harrison once remarked, 'Try setting that to Handel.')

This would be easier to take if the modern translation were more accurate than the King James version, but that isn't always the case. Take the phrase I just quoted (better known to music-lovers as 'Every valley shall be exalted'). The Jerusalem Bible's version is a direct translation from the Septuagint (πασα φάραγξ πληροθήσεται), but I would have hoped that in the 21st century we wouldn't still be translating Hebrew scriptures via a frequently inaccurate Greek version. The Hebrew contains nothing to justify the Jerusalem Bible's translation. The word for what is going to happen to the valleys, נשא (which is used here in a passive form), means 'to lift up' (physically) or 'to exalt' (in status); it never means 'to fill in.'

The Jerusalem Bible's translation takes a description of a miraculous occurrence (who but God can 'lift up' a valley?) and turns it into something man-made ('filling' valleys is what sleazebag coal companies do in Appalachia). It also ignores the metaphorical meaning of נשא and destroys the parallel with the mountains and hills in the next part of the verse (שפל, which the Jerusalem Bible accurately translates as 'be laid low', can mean either 'be lowered physically' or 'be humbled').

Although this translation doesn't seem to have come from as far out of left field as 'mother' for τροφός in 1 Thessalonians, it is none the less ugly and misleading. Things like this make me wonder why the Church has used the Jerusalem Bible for so long.

Justus for All broken?

2005-11-30T23:01:00.000+01:00

I've been getting a weird-looking error message at Dave Justus's blog. I can't tell whether it's something he's done or a Blogger problem. Come to think of it ... Hello? Hello?

(Sorry for the silence, BTW; we were away for Thanksgiving, and I've just finished a Hebrew assignment.)

Update: Turns out Dave's now got his own domain. Congratulations!

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy

2005-11-17T22:57:00.000+01:00

Enough said.

Get Fuzzy is BACK!

2005-11-17T09:05:00.000+01:00

OK, technically Get Fuzzy never went away, but in recent weeks it's been uninspired. The cartoonist, Darby Conley, seemingly had trouble focusing on a coherent story arc and settled for predictable one-off gags that sometimes raised the disturbing spectre of Garfield squashing a spider.

Happily, the drought seems to have ended. This week's series of strips has been a corker (especially Monday, Tuesday and above all Wednesday - there's one I'd cut out and put on the fridge if I actually read it in a newspaper). Even the style of drawing has improved: Whereas recent strips had sometimes dwindled to talking heads, the latest instalments have returned to Conley's hallmarks of unusual perspective and quirky detail. Let's hope it stays that way.

As of yesterday, Conley has fewer worries to interfere with creativity: He's managed to settle out of court with sportscaster Bob Lobel, who had filed a potentially nasty lawsuit against him for a strip that implied Lobel was drunk on the air. (Lobel's behaviour is apparently common knowledge in Boston, where he works, but he still tends to sue people who are rude enough to mention it.) Conley got away with an apology and a donation to charity.

Life in the Undergrowth

2005-11-16T09:01:00.000+01:00

If you're quick, you can hear a short interview with David Attenborough that was broadcast last night on Radio 4's Front Row (this link will take you directly to the programme for the next seven days). He had some interesting things to say about using computer effects in documentaries and about the 'intelligent design' debate.

Sir David was promoting his new series about terrestrial invertebrates, Life in the Undergrowth. This would ordinarily be one of the few times when I regret not having a television. But in this case, the DVD is coming out in a couple of weeks, so we'll be able to watch it on our computer while the series is still being broadcast on telly.

I've already read the book, in which Attenborough describes the bizarre, beautiful and horrifying lives of his tiny subjects with the ever-fresh enthusiasm of your favourite teacher at school. It's not everyone who can write affectionately about water bears (although Martin Mach also manages it in a delightful article for Micscape magazine).

My only complaint is that the book is full of typos and punctuation errors. I've been noticing this more and more in new nonfiction books (with Simon Sebag-Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar being the worst offender so far). Can't publishers afford proofreaders any more?

'Darwin's pet' turns 175

2005-11-15T09:14:00.000+01:00

Today is the birthday of one of the world's oldest living animals. Harriet, a Galapagos tortoise living in Steve Irwin's zoo, celebrated her 175th with a hibiscus-flower cake. She was born in the same year as Emily Dickinson.

Legend has it that Harriet once belonged to Charles Darwin, who collected her and two other tortoises from the islands in 1835. But the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports that there's some controversy over the story:

While DNA evidence shows Harriet hatched on one of the Galapagos islands 175 years ago, her DNA also shows she came from an island that Darwin never visited.

Ms Stewart says there could be an explanation for how Harriet came from Santa Cruz Island but was found on James Island.

"Giant tortoises were a commodity to be traded. The other thing is of course that her parents might have been moved from Santa Cruz to James Island and then bred, producing Harriet," she said.

Sadly, Pat Robertson's birthday card for Harriet seems to have got lost in the post.

Lawrence of Arabia

2005-11-14T09:18:00.000+01:00

Last weekend we went to see the Imperial War Museum's exhibit about T.E. Lawrence. If you're passing through London between now and next April, I highly recommend it. Not only are there artifacts from throughout Lawrence's life -- from his first lock of baby hair to the motorcycle that killed him -- but the museum takes a thoughtful look at how his legend grew beyond his control.

I was passionately interested in Lawrence as a teenager but hadn't studied much about him for a few years. Back when I was reading about him, the fashionable view was that he had exaggerated his role in the Arab revolt. I was pleased to learn that more recent scholarship has vindicated him -- indeed, it seems that, if anything, he understated his role. It's nice to know that sometimes you can trust your heroes.

Another bit of good news is that from next year, most of Lawrence's writings go out of copyright, and the T.E. Lawrence Society plans to make as many as possible available on the web.

Mnemonic

2005-11-08T19:43:00.000+01:00

The other day in the canteen at work, one of the cooks noticed the Patrick O'Brian novel at the side of my tray.

'That's a very good author,' he said, 'though I never thought of him as a ladies' author before. Mind you, I suppose Jack Aubrey is quite a ladies' man, isn't he? And the doctor too, to an extent.'

(Actually, one of the things I like about the Aubrey-Maturin novels is their wealth of strong female characters, like Diana Villiers, Louisa Wogan and Queenie Keith. But I couldn't start a detailed discussion while my colleagues were queueing up behind me for their lasagna.)

'If you like those books,' he said as I was paying, 'there's another very good writer called Tristan Jones. If you have trouble remembering his name, just think of Tristan da Cunha, the islands, and then think of Wales.'

And what do you know? It works.

Szybkiego powrotu do zdrowia, Daquise

2005-10-31T22:45:00.000+01:00

We were sorry to hear that one of our favourite restaurants is closed following a kitchen fire. Daquise, in South Kensington, has been serving good, cheap Polish food for nearly 60 years; according to this article, it was a gathering place for the Polish government-in-exile during the Communist era. Just two years ago, the restaurant survived a proposal to knock down the block where it was located and build luxury flats.

Daquise is our favourite place to go after a Prom or a visit to the Kensington museums. We hope it will be back in business soon.

Passport for Planet Woman

2005-10-29T17:52:00.000+01:00

I think I'm shopping above my demographic. Since we started having our groceries delivered by Ocado, they've been giving us free samples that seem designed for someone else's lifestyle entirely. It was all very amusing when we were getting cognac and flavoured soya milk, but recently they've switched to introductory issues of upscale women's magazines and catalogues.

I don't often visit the land of women's publications, and these keep giving me culture shock. It's not the fluff about clothes and diets, which I expect; it's the offhand remarks and images that reveal an utterly foreign outlook on life, making me wonder: Do most women really think like that? Did I miss the initiation?

I first encountered this with a sample of Easy Living, a new magazine aimed at women between 30 and 50. The feeling of foreignness came upon me during an article claiming that women often buy things based on ambitions that they will never fulfill (for example, joining gyms they will never go to, or buying elaborate cookbooks when they live on takeaways). I could just about go along with that until the author revealed what she considered to be the ultimate example of this failing: subscribing to The Economist.

Now, I subscribe to The Economist, and I usually read the whole thing; and what's more, I find it more interesting than Easy Living. But the author and editors clearly thought this sentence would make the average 30-to-50-year-old woman nod and chuckle in self-recognition.

Our next delivery included a Boden catalogue, featuring pictures like this:

I'm afraid my first impulse on seeing these models is not to pick up the phone and order the clothes they're wearing. My first impulse is to call a doctor. I don't expect or want a mainstream fashion catalogue to feature Dawn French, but it's certainly possible to find lovely, slim models who don't look like they're about to fall over from emaciation. Here are a couple of examples from catalogues that I actually get by choice, Lands' End and Traidcraft:

Of course, Lands' End is a former sail manufacturer that specialises in a sporty, casual look, and Traidcraft is avowedly for granola-muchers, so neither of them could be called typical of fashion-land. Perhaps folks in that strange country really believe that the models above have the perfect shape, which would mean that those at left are bloated and grotesque. I'm not familiar enough with their customs to say.

Last and worst was Grazia, 'Britain's First Weekly Glossy,' which arrived last Thursday. Inoculated by my previous encounters, I held out for a while. I got through the stupid celebrity news. (It seems that when actresses pop out for a pint of milk, they often don't look as good as they do at film premieres. A team of dedicated editors is working around the clock to unravel this mystery.) I coped with the fact that the only dress in the magazine I liked appeared in a still from Bleak House. But I could no longer bear it when the magazine praised a celebrity for wearing a skirt suit without 'looking like Condoleezza Rice.'

Excuse me? I disagree vehemently with Dr Rice on most issues and I hate where she and her boss are leading my country, but it never occurred to me to criticise her clothes. In every picture I've seen of her, she's been dressed like a grown woman doing an important job -- which is, of course, precisely what she is. However you feel about Dr Rice and her politics, you can't deny that she is one of the few women in this world who is always assured of being taken seriously.

It's a well-known misogynist strategy to undermine a powerful woman by questioning her 'femininity' or attractiveness. Such attacks are meant to keep not only the woman in question, but all women, in their proper place. Yet here we have a magazine allegedly produced by and for young, modern, forward-thinking women, mocking Dr Rice for not dressing sexily enough -- unfavourably comparing her to a bit of bone-structure-for-hire who probably didn't even choose that skirt suit herself.

If that's how they do things on Planet Woman, I'm content to be an alien.

Nailing one's colours to the mast

2005-10-29T00:02:00.000+01:00

This morning I woke up to Radio 4's announcement that one or the other candidate in the terminally boring Tory leadership contest had 'nailed his colours to the mast'. (Apparently he promised to cut taxes, if you can imagine a politician taking such a courageous stand.) This made me think once again about the evolution of that metaphor. The phrase comes from the navy and originally meant 'to rule out the possibility of surrender'; as the 1898 edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable says, 'When the colours are nailed to the mast they cannot be lowered in proof of submission.' (This is not always a good thing, as readers of Patrick O'Brian's novel The Mauritius Command will know.)

Nowadays, however, I most often hear the phrase used to mean 'state one's opinion' or 'make one's position clear' (although, strictly speaking, that's hoisting one's colours). I don't know when the popular usage changed, but it seems to have happened sometime in the past 75 years. (The 1922 edition of Roget's Thesaurus lists 'nail one's colours to the mast' with synonyms like 'throw away the scabbard,' 'set one’s back against the wall' and 'burn one’s bridges,' suggesting that 'no surrender' was still the predominant meaning then.)

There are enough people around who know the original meaning to make the phrase ambiguous in some contexts. Take David Whoever's statement about taxes. If he was 'nailing his colours to the mast' in the modern sense, then he was simply saying, 'This is what I think.' But if he was doing it in the original sense, then he was saying, 'This is what I think, and I'll allow myself and my supporters to be destroyed rather than compromise.' Personally, if I were a Tory, I would be wary of a leader who took the latter position. But on second thought, if I were a Tory, I might find it refreshing to have a leader who actually had a reason for letting the party sink.

He knows I'm gonna stay

2005-10-25T22:20:00.000+01:00

Radio 2 documentaries - you've gotta love them haven't you? Well, OK you don't have to, but if you cook on Saturday nights, you have to listen to something.
This weekend just gone, in their continuing mission to narrate the history of every band ever to exist, they reached the Mamas & Papas - certainly not a bad act, and one with a dramatic enough history, but with Mama Cass and John Phillips having gone to the great free festival in the sky, so to speak, there was no way we'd get the complete inside story, and instead there was plenty of room for the usual filler : music writers. Now I think music journalism is a more derided profession than it always deserves, but the written word is its natural home. And if, as in this case, they weren't there at the time, it seems a little presumptuous of them to tell us what Lou Adler felt. Of course they've researched this, but I could have done that too, and frankly they might as well have added the information to the presenter's script.
Worse still, the presence of the microphone seems to turn critics who are no doubt perfectly fine in print or in person into showboaters, desperate to get themselves into the trailer by suggesting that Mama Cass "let it all hang out - literally" [because she was a bit overweight - geddit!!??!!] or that she had a voice like "liquid honey".

Best of all was this assessment of their first hit, 'California Dreamin'' from a scribe I've never heard of before. Apparently it's "like the Beach Boys but without Brian Wilson's angst." We'll leave aside the fact that the reference to angst is hardly the most accurate depiction of Wilson's music circa 1965 (there's sadness to be sure, but it's not that sort). He seems to have missed the point of the song altogether - you know and I know that they were in California when they recorded it, but the viewpoint is that of someone pining for the Sunshine State; hence "I'd be safe and warm if I was in LA". The brilliance is in the line "If I didn't tell her I could leave today" - you know the protagonist never is going to go, and she (or he) probably knows it too: the preacher certainly does. And yet having the dream there is a comfort and it's valuable for that alone; I've always thought that the myth of California was more exciting than the real thing.
Perhaps this is part of the reason why the version that the Beach Boys eventually did release fails so spectacularly - they're just so deeply and irrefutable Californian that the imagery falls flat. Admittedly, the biggest problem is that they recorded it in 1986 (and for a Greatest Hits collection to boot)by which time they were a spent force in the studio, and the ugly production values of the time do it no favours. Still, the version that I remember the River City People performing on Pebble Mill At One seemed to count for more.

New James Lileks book

2005-10-25T17:35:00.000+01:00

Damn Lileks, always finding ways to separate me from my money. He didn't even trail this one on the site. Still, it should tide me over till the Joe Ohio book comes out.

Glory glory hallelujah

2005-10-21T18:43:00.000+01:00

It looks as if Wikipedia's entry on the schoolyard classic 'Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school' is going to survive a vote on its deletion. It's good to see that those who don't consider such matters worthy of encyclopedists' attention are outnumbered by those who do.

Personally, I find children's lore fascinating. Until very recently, kids didn't have the Internet; they've never had a voice in traditional media (sure, children's entertainment abounds, but it consists mainly of adults talking to children, not children talking to each other); they don't write down their playground chatter for future generations, and until the 20th century most scholars considered such things beneath their notice. Yet many schoolyard parodies, rhymes and sayings manage to spread from child to child throughout the English-speaking world. In The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (the book quoted at the bottom of this page), Peter and Iona Opie describe a striking example of this contagion from the 1930s:

A notorious instance of the transmission of scurrilous verses occurred in 1936 at the time of the Abdication. The word-of-mouth rhymes which then gained currency were of a kind which could not possibly, at that time, have been printed, broadcast, or even repeated in the music hall. One verse, in particular, made up one can only wonder by whom,

Hark the Herald Angels sing,
Mrs. Simpson's pinched our king,

was on juvenile lips not only in London, but as far away as Chichester in the south, and Liverpool and Oldham in the north. News that there was a constitutional crisis did not become public property until around 25 November of that year, and the king abdicated on 10 December. Yet at a school Christmas party in Swansea given before the end of term, Christmas 1936, when the tune played happened to be 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing', a mistress found herself having to restrain her small children from singing this lyric, known to all of them, which cannot have been composed much more than three weeks previously. Many an advertising executive with a six-figure budget at his disposal might envy such crowd penetration.

I did some work on the 'burning of the school' article after finding it via the votes-for-deletion page, but it still needs improvement. I'd particularly like to know when the song's existence was first recorded. I would guess that the parody appeared not long after the writing of the Battle Hymn itself -- and perhaps versions of it were being sung even earlier. Some children in Lincolnshire whom the Opies interviewed sang 'Glory, glory, hallelujah/Teacher hit me with a ruler' and identified this as a parody of the Battle Hymn's predecessor, 'John Brown's Body'.

(Chris had never heard of the song, however; seeing the lyrics to 'Mine eyes have seen the glory ...' on Wikipedia, he asked me, 'Who wrote this stuff, 50 Cent?')

Get Fuzzy quiz

2005-10-19T21:37:00.000+01:00

Chris and I got the same result, which doesn't really surprise me. Mind you, Chris does have certain Satchel-like characteristics, too.

You are Rob Wilco! You own Bucky Katt and Satchel
Pooch, and put up with their antics constantly.
You work in an Ad Agency, and do your best to
balance work and dealing with your pets. You
listen to Leo Kottke and like the New Zealand
All Blacks along with many other great things.
You are very sarcastic and generally wear
glasses.

Which Get Fuzzy Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

(The cartoon panel leaves out the punch line, in which Satchel says, 'No, I think it's a plain old conger eel.')

Pottos stay put

2005-10-18T19:08:00.000+01:00

I've heard back from London Zoo, and it seems the pottos will be staying there and will be on display in the old elephant pavilion. So I can keep up my regular visits to them, which is good to know.

Whither the potto?

2005-10-17T22:15:00.000+01:00

London Zoo's pottos, like the rest of their small and nocturnal mammals, have recently had to move house so that their building can be refurbished.

The question is, where have they gone? Some of the animals are going to be displayed in another building during the two years of renovation; others will stay at the zoo, but remain off exhibit; and still others will stay temporarily at different zoos. The zoo's press release doesn't say which group the pottos are in. This isn't just bizarre curiosity (though it is that as well); I've adopted a potto for two years running and hope I'll be able to continue. I've e-mailed the zoo, so I should find out soon.

The small-mammal house refurbishment is one of many changes coming to London Zoo. They're planning to do away with cages and glass enclosures, keeping the animals in more natural 'environments' where they are separated from visitors by moats or low fences. They've already completed two sections: walk-through exhibits of squirrel monkeys and African birds. We've been through both of these, and they look great. Around the time that the small-mammal house reopens, the zoo will also be starting a frog centre, from which they'll run captive breeding programmes for some of the world's most endangered amphibians. Give me all this and pottos, and I'll be in zoo heaven.

Breakin' the LAW!

2005-10-14T23:52:00.000+01:00

Over at Volodymyr Campaign, we're planning to take part in tomorrow's international walk for Belarusian democracy. Eastern European politics aren't a fashionable cause in Britain. I won't say how many people we're expecting; it sounds much better to say that we've doubled the numbers since our last event. Ahem.

Last night I was alarmed to receive this e-mail from the Metropolitan Police:

Hi,
Your website, & details of the walk on the 15th October have come to my attention...
This unit is responsible for helping organisations manage their marches/demos safely & we plan the police response to all major events in Central London.

We are a little concerned as we know nothing about your proposed event. Certain events require the organiser to provide police with 6 clear days notice. There are certain areas of Central London where marches & other events are restricted.

We will give you any advice & assistance you need for the event but it is in your interests to let us know what you are doing.

I need to know how many people you expect, whether or not you propose to walk on the road, & a number of other factors concerning your event.

Please call me on the numbers below as soon as possible.

[Name and number removed]

I spoke to the police officer, who explained that the Public Order Planning Unit had found our website and concluded that we must be a large organisation with the potential to bring London to a halt. After I stopped laughing, I assured him this was not the case, and he told me we would be OK to go ahead with the walk.

The fact is, though, we're still breaking the law. According to the Public Order Act 1986 (laws made before 1988 aren't online, but here's a Home Office memo discussing the relevant section), organisers must give "six clear days notice" of any procession intended 'to demonstrate support for or opposition to the views or actions of any group; or to publicise a cause or campaign; or to mark or commemorate an event.' According to this site, there is no minimum number to constitute a procession. If you and your grandmother plan to walk down Main Street to give the mayor a letter about a traffic crossing, you need to inform the police a week beforehand or you could be fined up to a thousand pounds.

Needless to say, the police don't have the time or interest to go around enforcing this law. But it's there whenever the government wants to use it.

Mice All Over

2005-10-12T21:38:00.000+01:00

A few days ago, an old post on Google Groups called my attention to a fascinating-sounding book called Mice All Over by Peter Crowcroft. Apparently it's a study of the behaviour of mice in the wild, and every review I've found (a couple of examples are here and here) agrees that it's well-written and charming. Unfortunately, it's also long out of print (yes, you can buy it secondhand, but it's the principle of the thing).

It occurred to me that this is exactly the sort of book that Dover was designed to rescue, so I suggested it to them today. I have no idea how seriously they take such suggestions, but we shall see.

Peter Crowcroft's son Simon has started a memorial page for him.; it seems he had quite an eventful life, including a brief marriage to Miss Tasmania.

Earthquake in Kashmir

2005-10-10T20:39:00.000+01:00

Kashmiri blogger Samir Bhat has a must-read post about the aftermath of Saturday's earthquake:

Quakes shake consciences. It shook the whole of valley and Pakistan to its innards. Hundreds of thousands died. They say more than 15,000 may have perished in Muzzafarabad alone. One of our relatives -- living in Muzzafarabad -- told my family over telephone that his teacher wife was missing. He fears the worst. She is among the countless unaccounted for. Nature's fury is cadaverous, merciless. It leaves children and the sick trampled in its tracks. Thats exactly what happened in Kashmir. School children are still buried in the rubble of their classrooms and dormitories,the state administration is dazed, too paralysed to act.

I talked to my family many times over on Phone. I called up my friends in Kashmir also. They are all in a state of shock. Traumatised and scared. I think it is natural after a major accident for people to behave like that. I'm stressed out -- away from home -- watching the horror unfold on my TV. Sheer imagery of people, blood still dripping, being carried away, of women wailing, of the sick shivering in the cold. It looks a slice of the Armageddon but this pain is too real to be passed over.

I was informed that my bedroom -- back home -- has developed cracks. All books fell off my book racks and piled up on floor. "Only a copy of the Holy Q'uran remained on the shelf," my little sister added. I could only gasp. I don't believe in such stuff but in times of great adversity, only the unpalatable becomes palatable.

Read the whole thing.

Also, Pickled Politics has a good list of organisations accepting donations for the relief effort.

The Church and the Bible

2005-10-05T08:04:00.000+01:00

Ekklesia reports:

Roman Catholic bishops have published a teaching document which points out that sections of the bible can not be taken literally, and challenges many ideas held by some Evangelicals about both creation and the end of the world.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.

Some Christians want a literal interpretation of the story of creation, as told in Genesis, taught alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools, believing “intelligent design” to be an equally plausible theory of how the world began.

But the first 11 chapters of Genesis, in which two different stories of creation are told, are among those that this country’s Catholic bishops insist cannot be “historical”.

In the document, the bishops acknowledge their debt to biblical scholars. They say the Bible must be approached in the knowledge that it is “God’s word expressed in human language” and that proper acknowledgement should be given both to the word of God and its human dimensions.

The Bible is true in passages relating to human salvation, they say, but continue: “We should not expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters.”

They go on to condemn fundamentalism for its “intransigent intolerance” and to warn of “significant dangers” involved in a fundamentalist approach.

As examples of passages not to be taken literally, the bishops cite the early chapters of Genesis, comparing them with early creation legends from other cultures, especially from the ancient East. The bishops say it is clear that the primary purpose of these chapters was to provide religious teaching and that they could not be described as historical writing, reports the Times newspaper.

Similarly, they refute popular interpretations of the book of Revelation, which see it as predicting contemporary events.

(I've tried to find a copy of the document online, but so far all I can find are offers from the Catholic Truth Society to sell it to me for four quid.)

Naturally, the media's knowledge of religion being what it is, The Times has given this story the inflammatory headline 'Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible'. (Check out the list of 'true' vs. 'untrue' passages. Are journalists actually required to hand over their brains when they sell out to Murdoch?)

In fact, the bishops are merely reiterating the Church's long-held position on scripture. The Catholic Church has never believed in a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible; that is a Protestant idea, and a relatively recent one. St Augustine read the first chapters of Genesis as an allegory.

I for one am very glad to see this document. I've recently been disturbed to find fundamentalist tendencies creeping into individual Catholics' reading of the Bible. I remember one Scripture group where a couple of us were discussing factors in the Johannine community that might have caused the author of John to write about the washing of feet rather than the institution of the Eucharist. We were interrupted by horrified cries of 'But John wrote this! It's an eyewitness account! Maybe he was just distracted when Jesus broke the bread!'

For too long, the Church has failed to provide guidance to lay Catholics reading the Bible. Meanwhile, fundamentalists have loudly proclaimed themselves to have the only true interpretation of Scripture. The lack of an effective response by churches with more liberal interpretations has led to Christians far outside the fundamentalist tradition being influenced by fundamentalist ideas, and has even affected the reputation of Christianity as a whole. (It's very frustrating and painful to hear people speak disdainfully of 'Christians,' when what they really mean is 'Pat Robertson.') I hope that this document is just the start of a new trend.

Curious George Cashes In

2005-10-04T08:03:00.000+01:00

There's a new Curious George movie coming.

The animated George looks like this.

The movie stars Will Ferrell and Drew Barrymore and has a soundtrack by 'alternative rock singer/songwriter Jack Johnson.'

I hate Hollywood.

(Also, someone needs to tell the USA Today reporter that there are tail-less monkeys -- the Barbary macaques of Gibraltar, for example.)

Parcelnet

2005-10-01T10:20:00.000+01:00

I've written before about our troubles with Royal Mail/Parcelfarce. So when I got home yesterday to find a 'sorry we missed you' card on the doormat, I thought I could look forward to a few days of arguing with automated telephone lines, sitting on hold to the depot, and having at least one redelivery request ignored before finally managing to collect my Amazon purchases (the next three Aubrey-Maturin novels) on Tuesday or so.

When I got upstairs, however, I realised that the card wasn't from Royal Mail, but from a company I'd never heard of called Parcelnet. It gave a local number to ring for redelivery. I called it expecting to be greeted by a computer; instead, I got through to someone's house.

'Erm ... hello,' I said to the elderly woman who answered the phone. 'Sorry to trouble you, but someone wrote this number on a card ...'

'Oh yes,' she said. 'He won't be able to redeliver until tomorrow now; is that all right?'

Tomorrow? As in Saturday? 'Yes, that's fine.'

She had a quick discussion with someone else in the room. 'Will you be home in the morning?'

'Yes, we should be.'

'He'll be there before 11.'

And shortly after 10 this morning, a cheerful man who looked spookily like Patrick O'Brian arrived with my books.

I couldn't find out much about Parcelnet from their amateurish website, but from other sources I learned that the company employs local people to work part-time making deliveries in their area. As Pete Ashton explains:

Parcelnet, on the other hand, employ mothers with large cars. I know this because I worked at one of their depots for a few days. Deliveries for the local area are split up by postcode and in the morning a bunch of normal looking people arrive in their normal looking cars and pick them up. I imagine they're parents with kids in school looking to earn a bit of part time cash. Drop the kids off, pick up the parcels, deliver them, pick the kids up.

Or, as in our case, the couriers are retirees looking to supplement their pensions.

I'm very happy with the service we got, but it doesn't say much for Royal Mail that Amazon thinks its parcels can be delivered more effectively by a company using a slightly more sophisticated version of the paper round.

Helen Cresswell dies

2005-09-27T17:29:00.000+01:00

Helen Cresswell, the author of the hilarious children's series The Bagthorpe Saga, has died aged 71.

I remember spending many hours with the brilliant but deranged Bagthorpe family. Even though some of the more British references were lost on me, I was captivated by these manic, original and thoroughly unsentimental tales. Through them, Cresswell -- like her saga's hero, Jack -- has achieved Immortality.

More on Beslan cult scam

2005-09-27T08:24:00.000+01:00

David McDuff has translated a statement by Mothers of Beslan denouncing the activities of a cult that promises to resurrect their murdered children for cash.

We categorically declare that this visit was a provocation, the purpose of which is to discredit and, as a result, to neutralize our movement. It is just one more plan devised by the authorities and special services in order to liquidate our organization by means of psychological action and pressure on the leadership of the committee headed by Susanna Dudiyeva. However, our public organization has many more members than the 10 people whom it was possible to brainwash [zombirovat’ = “turn into zombies, zombify”].

The overwhelming majority of the victims have remained in possession of their senses. We do not intend to reject our purposes and tasks in the reaching of the truth. We also declare: those who organized this provocation did not attain and will not attain a split in our ranks. Despite the fact that Susannah Dudiyeva took this step, she and all those who participated in the sectarian’s seances will remain with us.

We condemn the openly criminal and cynical repression of women who have survived terrible grief - the death of their children - and are fighting for justice.

Out of the Doldrums

2005-09-25T14:02:00.000+01:00

We've got a new priest in our parish. He started this morning's homily by reading an excerpt from The Phantom Tollbooth.

I think I'm going to like him!

Charity shop coup

2005-09-24T18:53:00.000+01:00

In a week when we'd already got The Complete Calvin and Hobbes earlier than expected, we've had another very exciting comics-related purchase. Browsing in a charity shop a few suburbs over, I found the very first Perishers book, in excellent condition, for just 30 pence!

If the British took their comics as seriously as the Americans do, the Perishers would have their own deluxe hardcover anthology, and probably a gallery show or two. As it is, all the collections of Britain's greatest ever strip are long out of print. (The comic still runs in greatly diminished form in The Daily Mirror, but it is no longer anthologised and, frankly, does not deserve it.) I've seen the first book going on eBay for upwards of £30.

For more on the Perishers, see Jean Rogers' excellent essay at the Shadow Gallery.

Beyond words

2005-09-23T08:28:00.000+01:00

More sad and sinister news relating to the Beslan school massacre. From The Moscow Times:

At least 11 mothers of children who perished in last year's Beslan school attack have turned to a cult that promises to resurrect the dead for money.

Some Beslan families fear that the mothers' quest will discredit their efforts to establish the truth about the attack, which killed 331 people, including 186 children.

Police say their hands are tied because no one has filed a complaint.

Susanna Dudiyeva and Anneta Gadiyeva, who complained to President Vladimir Putin at a Sept. 2 meeting about the handling of the hostage-taking crisis, joined nine other mothers at the Kosmos hotel last Saturday for a gathering of 400 followers of Grigory Grabovoi.

"I believe in the miracle of resurrection," Dudiyeva said, her voice trembling, as she stood next to Grabovoi on the podium.

"I used to read fairy tales to my children. I told them to believe in them and to believe in God," she said, in footage shown on NTV television. "We will follow this path until the very end for the sake of our children."

Grabovoi, who covered the mothers' travel expenses, called the meeting the sixth congress of the "DRUGG political party." DRUGG, which sounds like the Russian word for "friend," is the Russian acronym for the Voluntary Dissemination of Grigory Grabovoi Teaching.

Grabovoi promised attendees that Beslan children would be resurrected in October, Izvestia reported.

According to DRUGG literature and previous lectures by Grabovoi, he offers people the chance to learn how to resurrect their loved ones on their own. Grabovoi, however, does not accept responsibility for failure, saying the dead sometimes refuse to be resurrected, or are resurrected in other parts of the world or in the bodies of other people.

But Zalina Guburova, who lost her 9-year-old son in the attack, was ready to accept his terms. "I want my child back, and I will believe in anything to get him," she told NTV.

At Saturday's gathering, a woman stood up and loudly accused Grabovoi of being a charlatan. She was led away by two of his guards.

"Many people told us that we would be cheated and drawn into something here," Dudiyeva then said, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported. "But we are just mothers whose souls are in pain."

Dudiyeva, who heads the Beslan Mothers' Committee, could not be reached for comment this week.

But Ella Kesayeva, an activist with the committee, suggested that her peers had been drawn to the cult because the authorities hoped to discredit the committee, which is widely respected for its tireless efforts to learn what really happened at the school.

"Most of us do not share those ravings about resurrection, and we believe that this filthy story was invented to cast our committee in a bad light," she said by telephone. "We believe in God. We don't need charlatans. We are past the most painful times, and we don't want to turn into zombies."

Kesayeva accused Grabovoi of taking advantage of the mothers and said he should be punished.

Yana Voitova, a North Ossetia-based journalist, said she knew of at least two Beslan mothers who were collecting the 40,000 ruble fee in hope of seeing their children again.

Mairbek Tuayev, a Beslan resident who lost his daughter, said several Grabovoi representatives came to the town late last year to distribute literature. "They are hitting at the most painful spots," he said. "They told my wife that it would be easier to bring back my daughter because her twin sister was alive."

Tuayev said one father whose daughter died was telling friends that a way had been invented to pass between the worlds of the dead and the living but that the government was hiding it from people.

Stripped out

2005-09-22T08:01:00.000+01:00

I was looking through our new Complete Calvin and Hobbes when I saw a strip that looked different than I remembered. I dug out our old anthologies and discovered I was right.

The strip in question is from 25 November 1988. I don't remember how it looked when it ran in the paper, but in the version collected in the 1990 anthology Weirdos from Another Planet!, the dialogue goes like this:

CALVIN: Watch out, Mom. I'm in a bad mood.
MOM: Be in a bad mood somewhere else, OK? I'm busy.
CALVIN: Hmph! I'll bet my biological mother would've bought me a comic book and made me feel better instead of shunning me like you.
MOM: Kid, anyone but your biological mother would've left you to the wolves long ago.
CALVIN: Yeah right. Really, how much did you pay for me?

In the Complete C&H, however, the phrase 'my/your biological mother' is changed to 'a good mother,' and Calvin's final bit of dialogue has been altered to: 'Yeah, right. Let's see your training certificate.'

Clearly, someone along the way decided that the original version was offensive to adoptive families. Since Bill Watterson is well known for exercising strict control over the strip, I can only assume that the change was his idea.

I certainly support an artist's right to change his or her work (heaven knows I've never published anything I didn't wish I could rewrite). I can also see why Watterson might have become concerned about the original strip, especially if he or someone close to him has adopted a child in the meantime. But the change will be disappointing to those who think the anthology should be a historical record of what actually appeared in papers at the time. What I find curious is that there's nothing in the book's introduction or promotional material to indicate that any of the strips have been altered.

I vaguely recall that there are a few other strips where Calvin voices suspicion that he was adopted; I'll have to look for these and find out if they've been changed as well.

It's Christmas!

2005-09-21T17:35:00.000+01:00

Never mind what the calendar says. This just arrived in the post.

(No, I don't know why it's listed as 'not yet published.')

Do not panic buy

2005-09-13T08:27:00.000+01:00

I'm going on strike.

For over six months, my contributions to this blog have been fueled by one all-important substance: coffee.

But now the soaring price of the beverage is threatening my way of life. And I'm going to protest until Gordon Brown does something about it.

Oh, politicians can offer their feeble excuses, invoking the old bogeymen "Supply" and "Demand," or trying to distract us with weather reports and harvest statistics from obscure countries. This is simply more of the waffle we've come to expect from New Labour. We all know the government can make everything better if it only chooses to. And it is the government's responsibility to ensure I never have to pay more than I want to for anything. I'm pretty sure that's in the Magna Carta, or maybe the Schengen agreement.

If I enjoy a latte in my local Costa or Caffe Nero (and you're not suggesting I use an espresso maker at home like a peasant, are you?), a whopping amount of the price consists of tax. It seems to me that scrapping the VAT would be a sure way to ease the financial burden. After all, what has tax ever got us, except schools, roads and hospitals? Let the government spend its own money on these things for a while instead of ours.

Some have had the nerve to suggest that I give up my favourite drink, or that I replace it with some treehugger beverage like herbal tea. Do these people even realise what they're saying? If their wild-eyed schemes were ever put into practice, vast swathes of the population would suffer from mild to moderate headaches. We coffee-drinkers are a mammoth force in society. And no one ever told the mammoths they had to 'adapt to changing times,' now did they?

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to stockpile some Celebes Kalosi.

(Non-British readers: click here.)

Here and there

2005-09-12T18:19:00.000+01:00

Just a few notes on interesting sites I've found lately:

When Robert Lancaster's mother told him about a 9/11 survivor with a miraculous story who had spoken at her church, he was suspicious and decided to investigate. The result, chronicled at stopkaz.com, is a fascinating true-life detective story spanning three countries. Lancaster's dogged research has undoubtedly saved many people from being taken in by a con artist (though I still wouldn't rule out Kaz's turning up at the Celebrate conference).
You don't have to be Asian to enjoy Sepia Mutiny, a witty, well-written blog covering South Asia and the South Asian diaspora.
At tintinologist.org, you can find everything from a thoughtful essay on the Belgian comic's popularity in India, to instructions for painting your garage door in a Tintin theme, to a small but fierce crusade to prove that the boy reporter was left-handed (or at least ambidextrous). Copyright restrictions (or rather, the Hergé Foundation's eagerness to enforce them) mean there aren't many pictures; you'll have to visit the official site for those.
The folks on the Snopes message board (warning: pop-ups galore) have been giving some thought to Brumas the cat's sudden change in hue. I like the sidewalk-chalk theory, myself.
Just under our list of links, you'll find a new feature: a random selection of our books from librarything.com. We learned about this fantastic new site from Language Hat and have been busy entering our collection into it ever since. The site allows anyone to catalogue their books like a professional librarian; just enter an ISBN, author or title, and the site does the rest. You can add subject tags of your own (if, for example, you want to list all the books you have that mention pottos) and share your library with other users. (I thought I might be weird for listing In Cold Blood under 'Americana,' until I saw that others had used the tag for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels.) Give it a try, but be warned: it's addictive!

In the first place, God made idiots

2005-09-08T19:46:00.000+01:00

West Harrow resident G. Martin, who wrote a letter to our local free paper, is right on top of a vital issue of these troubled times:

In the window of Ottakers, Harrow's most central bookshop, there is a 'back to school' display. Prominent in it is a quote from Mark Twain, 'I never let schooling get in the way of education.'

Working in personnel at a large firm that in the 1960s drew most of its staff intake from school leavers, I soon shared the opinion of my colleagues -- that education begins after you leave school.

There is, however, a difference between formal academic education and adult experience, and the former should not be dismissed.

The influence that Twain seemed to want to convey is in any case a false one.

Family circumstances meant that he has [sic] to take jobs in the evening and weekends but he was properly educated and the experience that he used in the few books that he wrote did not begin until later in life. [This is complete rubbish, as Wikipedia shows.]

His education shows in his competent prose style but unfortunately, he later became addicted to sound bites - e.g. 'All golf ever did was spoil a good walk.'

In recent months there have been welcome moves to end Yob culture and restore respect. Yobbishness and lack of respect are often most evident in school, probably to the detriment of pupils who are neither yobs nor lacking respect.

In the 1980s, we had Pink Floyd's appallingly irresponsible 'Another Brick In the Wall', with mumbled choruses of 'We don't want no education' and shouts of 'Teacher, leave that kid [sic] alone!'

Perhaps its real intention was not to encourage lack of respect or disparage education but there is no doubt as to the meaning that many children at school put to it.

The same applies to Mark Twain's silly remark.

I heard if you read Pudd'n'head Wilson backwards, it tells you to put on a hoodie and hang around the bus station!

Funny thing is, while the comment 'I have never let my schooling interfere with my education' is often attributed to Twain, there's no evidence that he actually said it. Same goes for 'Golf is a good walk spoiled,' and for many of the other 'soundbites' that are put in his mouth. (The indispensable twainquotes.com will tell you whether a particular quip is genuine or not.) This sort of false attribution often happens with well-known wits, since many people think a clever remark is funnier if it has a famous name behind it. As Oscar Wilde observed: 'Most epigrams were invented by the ancients, elaborated by the French and attributed to Disraeli.'

Gilligan RIP

2005-09-07T18:38:00.000+01:00

Along with Don Knotts, Bob Denver was one of West Virginia's two resident celebrities, so I'm disappointed that The Charleston Gazette's only coverage of his death so far has been a wire story with an added paragraph about the West Virginia connection. Let's hope the Gazette's staff will produce a suitable tribute in the next few days.

By the way, I don't know whether Denver's wife Dreama is a West Virginian, but she has a classic Southern West Virginia name. Back when I was editing copy at the Gazette, I used to see the name in a lot of obituaries; it usually belonged to a middle-aged daughter of the deceased. It was equally common for their mothers to be called Icie. I haven't often seen either name anywhere else.

The Fuschia Feline

2005-09-06T17:49:00.000+01:00

Many cat owners wonder where their pet goes when it wanders off, but not as much as this couple:

A couple are mystified by how their white cat turned pink during a morning stroll.

Philip and Joan Worth have been told by vets that Brumas, named after the first polar bear born at London Zoo, is not toxic. But no explanation can be found for the Barbie-pink rinse he acquired after walking near his home in Bratton Clovelly, Devon.

Mr Worth said paint was not believed to be the cause as Brumas' fur was not matted. "It occurred to me that it could have been wet dye from a washing line or even sheep dye, but there is no way he could have got the same colour so evenly all over."

The couple, who adopted Brumas after he was found on Dartmoor and taken in by the Cats Protection League, have five other cats but none of them has been affected in the same way.

Mrs Worth, a retired shop assistant, added: "We're quite happy to live with him as a pink cat. We love him whatever his colour is."

Stood up

2005-09-06T17:29:00.000+01:00

Sadly, we may never know what Mike Tyson and Vladimir Zhirinovsky had to talk about. RIA Novosti reports:

Former heavyweight champion of the world Mike Tyson failed to turn up to a meeting Tuesday with leader of the Russian Liberal Democratic Party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

According to Zhirinovsky, who has a reputation as an extravagant politician and something of an ultra-nationalist, Tyson was not feeling well. The meeting was supposed to have taken place in a downtown Moscow restaurant.

Zhirinovsky playfully suggested that Tyson might have been scared of his bodyguard and LDPR member Oleg Malyshkin, who was also a good boxer in his prime.

Together at last!

2005-09-05T23:03:00.000+01:00

A maddeningly brief item on Interfax reveals:

Former world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson has asked for a meeting with Russian Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) Duma fraction's press service said.

Tyson's producer phoned the press service and informed it about the boxer's desire to meet Zhirinovsky, an LDPR official told Interfax. "The LDPR leader agreed to meet Tyson, and a meeting will take place on Tuesday at 5.00 p.m. in the State Duma," the source said.

The press service did not say what in particular the two plan to discuss.

The Moscow Times provides a sliver more detail:

Later, however, the LDPR press service announced that Tuesday's meeting would take place at 3:30 p.m. at the Czech-themed restaurant "U Shveika," located near the Barrikadnaya metro station, in the center of the city.

Zhirinovsky expressed his condolences to Tyson about the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and suggested Tyson come to live in Russia. He went on to suggest that boxing matches could be held in Moscow and the two could socialize. He also promised to offer Tyson some of "his own green tea."

New Orleans tidbits

2005-09-05T19:10:00.000+01:00

One bright spot in the awful news from Hurricane Katrina is that the Audubon Zoo has survived with relatively little damage:

The famous Audubon Zoo has the good fortune of being located on some of the city's highest ground, but it also had a disaster plan for the animals that worked better than the city's plan for humans.

The only fatalities so far were two otters and a raccoon, zoo curator Dan Maloney said on Sunday.

He said the zoo had planned for years for the catastrophic storm that has long been predicted for New Orleans, which is mostly below sea level and almost surrounded by water.

Fourteen staffers stayed at the zoo to care for the animals throughout the storm and the aftermath that has left New Orleans in ruins.

"We stayed here because the animals can't leave," he said. "We were almost done with our ark and were training the animals to march in two-by-two, but we just didn't make it."

Also, a transcript of Andrei Codrescu's radio commentary, which I mentioned in an earlier post, is now available on the web site of his literary magazine, Exquisite Corpse.

Praline cake

2005-09-05T18:19:00.000+01:00

Since New Orleans is famous for its food, I thought it would be a good idea to make some New Orleans-style goodies and bring them in to work to raise money for the hurricane victims. After rejecting beignets (which don't keep well) and king cake (out of season), I decided on New Orleans pralines, using the recipe in Joy of Cooking.

Sadly, I found out that the dire opening paragraphs of Joy's 'Candy' chapter ('Most candy recipes require a considerable degree of patience, time, attention and practice to get right ... Fudge can overcook in just the time it takes to retrieve the right spatula') weren't hyperbole. The candy refused to set and remained sugary goo. In desperation, I tried freezing it, but that only produced cold goo. By now it was Sunday afternoon, and I'd promised to bring the treats in on Monday morning. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I decided to make some coffeecakes (Joy's yogurt cake recipe) and put the failed praline mixture on top instead of streusel.

The results, to my surprise, were delicious. Most of the 'topping' seeped down to the bottom, so the cake would ideally have been served turned out of the pan like a pineapple upside-down cake. It wasn't practical to do this at work, but the cake still had a wonderfully rich flavour and texture. It attracted lots of praise and requests for the recipe. The latter was difficult, since I couldn't very well begin by saying: 'Make some pralines, but get it wrong.' (If it's any help to you, I think my mistake may have been not to get the sugar hot enough. Also, when I baked the cakes, I found I had to do so for much longer than the recipe directed - about 50 minutes, instead of 25-30. That may have been because the topping was still cold from the freezer, though).

Oh: And we raised £35 for the British Red Cross's new Katrina appeal. Which is more important than all of the foregoing, of course.

In other bake-sale news, the women's softball team at Geneva College in Pennsylvania have donated the proceeds of their pepperoni-roll sale to the hurricane victims, instead of spending it on their spring trip as planned. This is interesting not only because of the students' generous act, but also because before I read it I didn't know they ate pepperoni rolls in Pennsylvania.

Oops

2005-09-02T12:58:00.000+01:00

I know newspaper supplements, like The Richmond (Ind.) Palladium-Item's Lifestyles magazine, have to be prepared well in advance of publication. But what possible excuse can their web editor have?

Spider by Czeslaw Milosz

2005-09-02T08:26:00.000+01:00

The thread with which he landed stuck to the bottom of the bathtub
And he desperately tries to walk on the glossy white
But not one of his thrashing legs gets a hold
On that surface so unlike anything in Nature.
I do not like spiders. Between me and them there is enmity.
I have read a lot about their habits
Which are loathsome to me. In a web
I have seen the quick run, a lethal stabbing
With poison that, in some species,
Is dangerous also for us. Now I take a look
And leave him there. Instead of running water
To end this unpleasantness. For, after all, what can we,
People, do except not to harm?
Not to pour toxic powder on the road of marching ants,
Save stupid moths rushing to the light
By putting a windowpane between them and the kerosene lamp
By which I used to write. Name this at last,
I tell myself: Reluctance to think to the end
Is lifesaving for the living. Could lucid consciousness
Bear everything that in every minute,
Simultaneously, occurs on the earth?
Not to harm. Stop eating fish and meat.
Let oneself be castrated, like Tiny, a cat innocent
Of the drownings of kittens every day in our city.

The Cathari were right: Avoid the sin of conception
(For either you kill your seed and will be tormented by conscience
Or you will be responsible for a life of pain).

My house has two bathrooms. I leave the spider
In an unused tub and go back to my work
Which consists in building diminutive boats
More wieldy and speedy than those in our childhood,
Good for sailing beyond the borderline of time.

Next day I see my spider:
Dead, rolled into a black dot on the glittering white.

I think with envy of the dignity that befell Adam
Before whom creatures of field and forest paraded
To receive names from him. How much he was elevated
Above everything that runs and flies and crawls.

Translated by the author and Robert Hass

New Orleans

2005-09-01T21:31:00.000+01:00

In a commentary for NPR, Andrei Codrescu combines a heartbreaking tribute to New Orleans with a perceptive analysis of political and environmental factors that aggravated the disaster.

Donate to the Red Cross relief fund

Face to face

2005-08-29T14:32:00.000+01:00

With a bit of spare time on a Sunday before the Prom last night, we slipped into the Natural History Musuem down the road, in order to enjoy the current Face To Face exhibition. I didn't know much about it - I'd only observed from the posters outside the building and gleaned that there were pictures of apes in it, which looked like a good idea to me.
It proved to be a fascinating experience, some thirty large close-up photos of gorillas, chimpanzees, Orang-Utans and bonobos. Movingly, they were united by suffering; most of them had seen their parents killed for the bushmeat and pet trades. As the photographer James Mollison explains on the website, it was a major part of his intent to draw attention to the mistreatment of apes, but he also wanted to emphasise the individuality of the animals.

For all that you're only standing in a darkened room looking at photographs, it's a remarkably moving experience. The scale and close range of the pictures (Mollison calls them "passport photos" but that certainly isn't a reference to their size) compels us to look at their faces and see all the details; it may be a coincidence that the faces of bonobos look wrinkled and weathered, but it suits the themes extremely well. It's saddening to get such a sense of how people can treat their close biological relatives, but then considering how we treat our closer relatives (ie other humans) maybe we shouldn't be surprised.

The exhibition runs until the 18th of September and entry is free. It's recommended to anyone passing through South Kensington before then.

Peace for goats

2005-08-27T20:51:00.000+01:00

Another animal has surprised scientists by turning up where it was thought to be extinct. The Independent reports that the cease-fire in Kashmir has had benefits for wildlife as well as for people:

The ceasefire between India and Pakistan in Kashmir has produced an unexpected beneficiary - the world's largest goat.

The markhor, a mountain goat that stands almost 6ft tall at the shoulder and can weigh 17 stone, was thought to be extinct in Indian-held Kashmir. But a recent joint survey by Indian wildlife organisations and the Indian army found 35 small herds - 155 goats - thriving near the Line of Control.

There's more info about markhors at the marvellously named ultimateungulate.com.

I'm in love with paisley ties again, let me look into those eyes again...

2005-08-24T22:23:00.000+01:00

You'll have to forgive the nepotism here, but I was very pleased to discover today that the debut album by The Dentists, catchily entitled Some People Are On The Pitch They Think It's All Over It Is Now, celebrates its twentieth anniversary with a CD reissue on the Rev-Ola label.
Thanks to the fact that one member of the band was my uncle (well, he still is, but he's not in the band any more) I have a copy of the original LP, as given to my mum when it originally came out. I was inspired to play it tonight and - whilst I can hardly claim to be unbiased - I think it stands up very well. And there's none of the big thudding drums you get on other records from 1985 either.

The new remastered edition - now including the single 'Strawberries Are Growing In My Garden (And It's Wintertime)' - is available from Amazon UK for pre-order.

Wot no Peter Andre?

2005-08-23T21:41:00.000+01:00

Our local paper has announced an exciting new poll: you can vote for the greatest ever person to live in Harrow.

There's a 25p per minute phone line, which I shan't encourage, but you can also vote by text on 84080.

If you'd like to vote for Roger Bannister, text "HOVOTE 01"

If you'd like to vote for Ronnie Barker, text "HOVOTE 02"

If you'd like to vote for Mrs Beeton, text "HOVOTE 03"

If you'd like to vote for WS Gilbert, text "HOVOTE 04"

If you'd like to vote for Bob Holness, text "HOVOTE 05"

If you'd like to vote for Matt Lucas, text "HOVOTE 07"

If you'd like to vote for Claire Rayner, text "HOVOTE 08"

If you'd like to vote for Anthony Trollope, text "HOVOTE 09"

If you'd like to vote for Vivienne Westwood, text "HOVOTE 10"

If you'd like to vote for Elton John, you should go and stand in a corner and think about what you've done.

Smokey Cat

2005-08-19T21:24:00.000+01:00

In 1985, when I was 10 and my brother was a baby, our neighbours took in a stray cat who promptly gave birth. We took home a grey tabby kitten with orange and cinnamon splotches and named her Smokey.

In most of my childhood memories, Smokey is there. She playfully pounced on my ankles when I came home from school. When I went for a walk in the woods, she was always behind me, pausing to climb up on each rock and fallen tree and survey the landscape. Once she tried to attack a timber rattlesnake, but I scooped her up and ran away. She kept up an indignant Mrrrroww! all the way up the hill.

She would climb into your lap when you spoke to her, and if you sat nearby while she was washing, she would pause now and then to give your hand a few rough licks. When she heard thunder, she strolled calmly to a certain spot in the back of my closet, as if she were in a fire drill. When we made popcorn, we could get her to go up and down the stairs by leaving a kernel on each step.

When I moved away from home, Smokey stayed with my parents and brother, but she always rushed out to meet me when I came for a visit. When I brought Chris to West Virginia for the first time, I wondered what she would think of him. We found out the next morning, when he awoke to find her purring on his chest.

This year Smokey turned 20, which is about as old as any cat gets. When I visited in July I saw that she had got a lot frailer. So I was sad but not surprised when my mother called today. The vet had found that Smokey had inoperable cancer, and rather than let her suffer, my parents decided to have her put to sleep. (I would have done the same thing.)

This is one of my favourite pictures of her. I took it about ten years ago. She's relaxing in my dad's arms. When she died he was holding her as he had so many times before.

Who's 'we'?

2005-08-18T19:37:00.000+01:00

Lately there's been some controversy in Russia about the new youth movement Nashi, which was started by the Kremlin in an attempt to stave off orange revolution. Although the group calls itself 'anti-fascist,' human rights activists fear (justifiably, in my opinion; you can find out more via the links on Volodymyr Campaign) that it's just the opposite.

Part of the debate involves the group's name, which is Russian for 'ours.' Some have interpreted this as a message to minorities, liberals and Nashi's other targets: 'This country is ours and not yours.' The organisation's press secretary, on the other hand, insists that 'ours' is meant to be all-inclusive: 'When we say "us," we mean anyone who lives and works for the good of our country.'

The English system of pronouns, like the Russian, makes no distinction between a 'we' that includes the person being addressed and a 'we' that does not. 'We're invited to a party tonight' can be followed by 'so put your suit on' or by 'Could you clean the oven while we're out?' 'This is our land' can mean 'This land is your land, this land is my land,' or it can mean 'so you wetbacks get out.'

In fact, I've never heard of a language that uses different words for 'us-with-you' and 'us-against-you.' German doesn't; neither does French or Spanish, Hebrew or Greek. (If any readers know of a language that does make a distinction, please let me know via the comments.) I find it hard to imagine that the idea has never occurred to any group. Then again, maybe certain aspects of human nature have always made such a distinction inconvenient. Without the ambiguity of 'we,' groups like Nashi would find it harder to prevaricate about what they stand for.

It's all about ...

2005-08-17T21:28:00.000+01:00

Let's consider the opening words of two middlebrow coffee-table books, both companions to TV nature series. Here are the first 170 or so words of David Attenborough's The Life of Mammals:

We have a special regard for mammals. We are, after all, mammals ourselves. Indeed, we tend to talk as if mammals are the only kind of animals that exist -- until, hard-pressed, we are forced to admit that birds, butterflies and bluebottles are also animals. Mammals, for the most part, have hair and are the only animals that rear their young on milk. Even so, there are a baffling number and variety of them. Over four and a half thousand. And they are more varied in shape and size than any other animal group. The biggest of them is the largest animal that has ever existed -- the blue whale, which is at least one and a half times as big as the biggest dinosaur. The smallest, the pygmy shrew, is so minuscule that it has to battle to subdue a beetle. Some mammals fly, some swim and some tunnel. Their diversity is so great that in order to sort them out in our minds we need to classify them into smaller groups. Faced with a mongoose in a zoo, we want to know what kind of mammal it is. Is it a kind of cat? Or maybe a dog? Or is it a giant rat?

And here are the first 170 or so words of Alan Titchmarsh's British Isles: A Natural History:

I am unashamed to boast that I love being British, and I'm happy to confess that I could not live anywhere else. It's a feeling that is not born of xenophobia or small-mindedness, but comes simply from a love of the landscape in which I have grown up, lived and worked for more than half a century. Unlike Nancy Mitford's father, I do not dislike 'abroad,' neither do I distrust foreigners. But, more than anything, I love coming home.

I was born and brought up in the Yorkshire Dales, and holidayed during my childhood in the Lake District and Scotland (not forgetting Blackpool). I now live in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, and often spend my holidays in Cornwall. This, coupled with 25 years of working in television and travelling the length and breadth of the country for programmes as varied as Gardeners' World and Songs of Praise, have served only to increase my love of the British Isles and their astonishing countryside.

I trust you can see why I'm having trouble reading the latter book.

(Christmas present, since you ask. And for all I know the show was brilliant - we don't have a television and only see the programmes we buy on DVD.)

Locatelli's C major quartet

2005-08-16T21:03:00.000+01:00

I recently started reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. I became interested in them when I heard that a potto plays a prominent role in some of the novels. Haven't got to the potto yet, but I'm hooked: I read the first two books in as many weeks, and the next two are waiting on my shelf.

Today I've been pondering an oddity in the opening sentence of the first book, Master and Commander:

The music-room in the governor's house at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli's C major quartet.

After reading the book, I became the latest in a long line of readers to try to track down a recording of this quartet -- only to discover that it doesn't exist. Oh, Pietro Locatelli was real, all right (though not particularly well-known today -- I'd never heard of him before), but so far as anyone knows he never wrote any quartets, in C major or any other key.

Readers have been wondering for a long time why O'Brian attributed a fictional work to a real composer. He certainly wasn't ignorant about music; the web page of one fan, Gibbons Burke, includes a long list of all musical compositions mentioned in the books, all except this one apparently genuine. So could this really be a simple error?

Some readers have suggested that the piece is another composition of Locatelli's that has been transcribed for a quartet. Others point out that many classical works have been lost over time, and propose that O'Brian intended the quartet to be one of the missing. These scenarios certainly aren't impossible, but I think the most plausible explanation is that it's a joke. A participant in this discussion recalls:

I remember this M&C passage being read by Richard Kapp, musical director of Philharmonia Virtuosi and producer of the Musical Evenings with the Captain series. ... It seems like I almost recall him saying that he mentioned the fabricated C major quartet to O'Brian and got a small smile in response - but I could be fabricating that myself!

Personally, I think O'Brian is hazing us. We're the greenhorns on his ship, and he's sent us looking for the musical equivalent of the key of the keelson. As one victim recounts:

It took me quite a number of searches, and some very confused music store salespeople before I found it out!

'... And one of them told me he thought the gunner's daughter might have it, but when I asked Mr Rolfe, he said he was sorry, he was not a married man. ...'

For lots more Aubrey-Maturin discussion, see The Gunroom of HMS Surprise.

The Bookshelf

2005-08-15T15:42:00.000+01:00

A strip mall in suburban West Virginia isn't where most people would go in search of serenity, but I always find it at Jim Sachse's shop, The Bookshelf, in Morgantown's Suburban Lanes Plaza. I first went there nearly 30 years ago, when I was learning to walk, and knocked over a wire book rack. Despite this beginning, I worked at the shop a couple of decades later, and might be working there still if it had paid anything approaching a living wage. When I'm in West Virginia now, I go out of my way (which is about the only way to get there) to pay a visit.

The shop is under a bowling alley -- the eponymous Suburban Lanes -- and faint rumbles and crashes go on continually overhead, like a tiny and unusually-paced thunderstorm. Occasionally the alley's bar springs a leak and causes beer to drip into the secondhand section. One of the stranger duties employees had when I worked there was to sniff splashed books and decide whether they smelled too boozy to keep on sale. Fortunately, any effect the leaks might have had on the overall atmosphere is obliterated by another of the shop's neighbours, an Italian bakery and pizzeria.

Secondhand books take up about two-thirds of the shop. Old paperbacks are laid flat and stacked to fill every inch of long wooden bookcases (wire racks are long gone, possibly thanks to me) whose shelves curve noticeably downwards, straining the seams of their powder-blue paint. One of Jim's innovations is to use thin paperbacks he didn't think he could sell (ancient dimestore romances, a children's biography of Prince Charles) as makeshift shelf dividers.

The idea is that customers can bring in their old books in exchange for a discount, but the precise system is so arcane that Jim doesn't allow his employees to explain it. He claims only he can describe his policy so it makes sense; I think it's more likely that only his extraordinarily self-assured tone can persuade people to hand over their books in silent bewilderment. A certain proportion of his business comes from little old ladies who come once a month to trade paperback romances they've read for ones that they haven't, but he keeps these books against one wall and leaves the main part of the store for more interesting stuff. Because Morgantown is a university town, it attracts a more varied mixture of people than most of the state, and it seems that every eccentric, exile, polyglot, artist or mystic to have passed through the city has left part of his or her library in Jim's store. I've found books there that I'd hunted for in vain on Charing Cross Road, and I can't think of anyplace I'd rather go when trying to satisfy a vague literary hunger. The shelves are just high enough, the aisles just long enough and the books just jumbled enough that I can browse in complete bliss, hidden from the outside world, searching for an unknown treasure.

The rest of the shop is marginally smarter and contains new books. There are large sections of literary fiction and poetry, popular science, and particularly religion. Jim's a Buddhist and carries a lot of books about Eastern religions (classics and scholarly works, not dumbed-down New Age crap), but also works on Christian, Jewish and Islamic mysticism.

The sales counter straddles both sections, and is usually covered with stacks of newly-arrived books and flyers for local yoga classes and poetry readings. Frequently Jim lights up when he sees the title of one of your selections. He seems to know something about every book he sells, and will discuss the relative merits of various translations of the Tao Te Ching, compare Florence King's work to his experiences growing up with a Southern mother, or chuckle as he recounts Herbert McCabe's first essay after his reinstatement: 'As I was saying before I was so oddly interrupted ...'

Until recently, another feature of the store was the microfiche machine that Jim used to check his supplier's catalogue, with a towel draped over the top for him to stick his head under on sunny days. Jim stubbornly kept this long after most other shops had got computers. Things are changing, though; when I last visited in July, I learned that The Bookshelf has done as complete a turnaround as Dover Publications did a few years ago, and will shortly be going online at http://www.WestVirginiaBookshelf.com/. Now I'll be able to visit while I'm in England, though I will have to see how well a website can duplicate the experience of being there. Still, no need to dodge dripping beer.

Buried treasure

2005-08-13T19:19:00.000+01:00

Kyrgyzstan Development Gateway tells an intriguing tale:

The Issyk-Kul Regional Archaeological Expedition of the Kyrgyz Russian Slavic University led by Academician, Vladimir Ploskih has been searching for an Armenian Brothers’ Monastery shown on the Katalan map of the world made in the 14th century for several years. Several days ago they found an underground temple.

There was a legend at the beginning

Local residents have long talked about a mysterious cave near Kurmentyu village in Issyk-Kul region.

25 years ago, Alexander Korabliev who was born here, said that when he was a child he had explored the cave and saw rooms dug there. According to him, there were almost 30 rooms on two levels.

The passage to the lower floor was almost completely blocked by rocks so only a small child could squeeze through.

According to legend, during the rebellion in 1916 a monk from a nearby orthodox monastery hid in the cave and since then the villagers have called it Monk’s Hole, thinking he was the one who dug it.

There is another version that says that Russian hermits who settled here in the second half of the 19th century built these rooms.

There is no written scientific record of this underground temple. All the nearby caves would have had to be explored and it was said that the entrance had been destroyed and it was too dangerous to go there. ...

The historians started their descent. We recognised at once that it was an architectural construction. One could see the professionally built arches and well thought-out design. Rooms cross at right angles and there are several passages that end in small cells. The main room just before the entrance sloped downwards and turned left and then there was an obstruction although its vault could be seen for several metres further.

When was it built? We found the answer in one of the arches where several deeply hammered in and totally corroded metal rods were found there, which could only have got in that state over a long period of time. The next day, Academician Vladimir Ploskih investigated the find and walked around all the rooms. In the evening he reported to all scientific and historical centres that the Armenian Brothers’ Monastery had finally been found and it was a sensation.

A lot of work remains to be done and first of all, it is necessary to clear away the obstructions in the cave and investigate the entire monastery.

It might be that this is the monastery where, according to the 14th Century map, the Apostle Mathew’s relics are kept.

Unfortunately, there seems to be little else in English on the Web about this, although I did find an English-language biography of Dr Ploskih.

The debate over whether St Matthew is buried in Kyrgyzstan has apparently been going on for some time -- an old entry from mirabilis.ca has a very good list of links on the subject. But regardless of whether the relics are there (I'm afraid I tend -- perhaps too often -- to fall into Disputations' Category B on these matters), the monastery is surely worth investigating on its own merits. I hope this won't be the last we hear of this discovery.

Shanghai Soup

2005-08-13T11:51:00.000+01:00

While looking for something else yesterday I came across Shanghai Soup, a wonderfully rich site about the history and culture of the Chinese city. Among the highlights are mp3s of charming recordings by the famous Shanghai singer Zhou Xuan, and the complete menu of the Sun Ya restaurant from about 1935. The latter made we want to go back in time and spend an evening there -- 28 pages of tantalizingly described Chinese dishes (I may try reconstructing the Melon Cup myself), and an American soda fountain.

One thing that caught my eye was the tagline on some pages of the menu: 'Our Kitchen is open to inspection at any time on request.' I've seen variations of this boast on several old restaurant adverts -- James Lileks has another example, this one from 1950s Las Vegas -- but it seems to have fallen out of fashion, probably because government health standards are now taken for granted. However, this steak house in Thailand, where regulations are less strict, still uses the line, and so do some catering firms.

Brought to you by the letter ...

2005-08-10T22:07:00.000+01:00

This looks like a great specimen for Nathan Hamm's MosNews Appreciation Society:

Monument to the Russian alphabet letter, an e with an umlaut, pronounced as “yo” is planned to be erected in the Central Russian city of Ulyanovsk.

This letter called “yo”, the only Russian character with an umlaut, was introduced in 1797 by the famous Russian historian and writer Nikolai Karamzin who was born not far from Ulyanovsk, then called Simbirsk.

The monument will be made of red granite.

Linguists to this day dispute the utility of the letter. It is replaced by the simple e in official documents.

Controversy that has for years delayed permission to proceed with the monument centered mainly on the fact that to the Russian ear the “yo” sound is closely associated with a range of colorful profanities or other exclamations considered in poor taste by opponents, AFP noted.

In case you suspect MosNews of making this up, here's a story about the proposed monument that appeared in the St Petersburg Times in 2001, and here's a transcript of an NTV interview from around the same time.

New lemurs discovered

2005-08-09T19:16:00.000+01:00

Madagascar's wealth of prosimian life has yielded two more lemur species, a mouse lemur and a giant mouse lemur. Go here for the technical stuff, or here for a cute picture of one of the species.

Babies at London Zoo

2005-08-08T19:21:00.000+01:00

A meerkat family relaxing at London Zoo on Sunday:

A serval kitten with its mother:

An African bird (I forget the name) spreads its wings to shield its chicks from the sun.

Codex Sinaiticus

2005-08-03T22:01:00.000+01:00

I was excited to learn that the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest known manuscripts of the Greek bible, is being digitised and will eventually be available free on the British Library's web site. Mark your diaries for summer 2009!