Essay research

From an essay on Julius Caesar at Cheathouse:

The Emperor Julius Caesar is perhaps most famous as the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity. His rise from a humble birth as a peasant boy to Emperor is a tale of bravery, adversity and ultimately triumph through faith.

Julius Caesar was born as Groyxo Gaul in 54BC into an immigrant family in the back streets of Rome. Neither parent was rich. The French historian Robert Kilroi-Silc noted: "Sa mere etait un hamster et son pere etait comme des baies de sureau."

His mother was a hamster?

No, it's not the work of some demented student. As blogger Alun explains, it's an attempt to figure out how bad a paper needs to be before it's rejected by an online essay bank. Obviously, the limit has not yet been reached and further research is needed.

(Link via the highly recommended Carnival of Bad History at Bora's Science and Politics blog.)

Addiction and recovery

A couple of posts over at Dean’s World - from Dean Esmay and Scott Kirwin - got me thinking about addiction and recovery. Dean was highly critical of Alcoholics Anonymous (though he’s since moderated those criticisms) and I just wanted to share my experience.

A couple of years ago, funded by the local authority, I took a busload of recovering addicts down to Cornwall for a week by the sea. Most of them had multiple addictions, usually alcohol and cocaine, and none of them had been clean longer than twelve weeks.

The idea was they’d get a week in the water with a surfing instructor, early morning exercises on the dunes and group work in the evenings. All in all, it worked well - the few incidents we had were emotional rather than physical confrontations. And, by the end of the week, some of the guys were even managing to stay on their boards. I got a lot out of it (quite apart from a week’s surfing), as did my co-worker, and I know the guys from the hostel enjoyed it.

Was it worth it? Probably not. Chances are, after twelve months, seven out of ten of them will be using again. In two years’ time, maybe one of them will still be clean. Even if they all managed it, I doubt any would credit their recovery to a week’s surfing in Cornwall.

But who knows? I’ve seen stranger things. One bunch of addicts I worked with had replaced heroin with cycling, and pedalled their way to recovery. They stayed clean and, along the way, founded a charity that provides accommodation for people in recovery - they kicked-off their fund-raising drive by cycling coast to coast across the States.

Another guy I know had a whole range of addictions. He quit them all one by one: heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, alcohol. He got through it because he found his vocation in life – painting model soldiers. Now, he does it for a living. He’s been clean twenty years, has raised a family and is as happy as any man I know.

Not one of the people I know who’ve come back from addiction would say that going to AA meetings was what got them through. It helped for sure, and they’ll tell you that they couldn’t have got through without it. But on top of that, there’s something each of them discovered, something they could connect with outside themselves that made it worthwhile for them to choose not to drink or use drugs again.

I know that every one of them would recommend AA/NA to someone who suspected they had a problem with alcohol or drug abuse. I’m not a big fan of the twelve step program but it works – if you want it to.

Torture and abuse

Via the Belgravia Dispatch: In a thoroughgoing and well documented post, John Henke at QandO argues the case against torture. And makes an observation as to its causes:

Widespread torture doesn't simply, oops, "just happen". In the isolated instances in which it does happen, it is the result of a very major breakdown in the command structure. As Dale Franks wrote: "Since there are no bad troops, only bad leadership, I have to wonder how complicit the chain of command is..." Indeed, that is the question: if the discipline breaks down so terribly at one place, the problem may well be at a local level. If discipline is breaking down at a lot of Military Intelligence detention centers across the globe over the course of years, then the chain of command is implicitly broken all the way to the top.

Alternately, they might be "just following orders".

I'd say probably a bit of both. And it's got to stop.

Common people

Jarvis Cocker ain't got nothing on this guy!

With thanks to Dean Esmay, who has the lyrics and an audio link.

Sunday roundabout

Normblog is polling the top ten movie stars.

Over at A E Brain, a young artist announces his presence to the world.

There's politics and Doctor Who at Biased BBC.

Oxblog highlights the organic adventures of Ham Solo and Chewbroccoli.

There's a little cold turkey at The Daily Bread but no caffeine for Jackie.

Roger L Simon asks what "fair and balanced" means. Lots of people tell him.

There's a blog western going on via Suburban Blight.

And finally,

VodkaPundit discovers Henry Raddick.

English manners

Ever had one of those elevator experiences that leaves you wishing you'd taken the stairs? An American in London just did, and she has an observation about English men. It seems they don't have the good manners she expected:

This comes as quite a shock to me, as somewhere in the back of my mind, for no specific reason, I was anticipating gentlemanly manners beyond compare.

It's a common misconception and stems, I think, from the pervasive notion of the English Gentleman. It's nonsense, of course. In general, I've found that one can only reliably expect impeccable manners from those Englishmen who ride bicycles while wearing scarves and carrying umbrellas.

There aren't a lot of them about.

Breathless in Bristol

My weekend away got cut short. After just one night under canvas, my health deteriorated to such an extent I had to come home. Mac and the boys are still in the Gower.

Summer is always a difficult time of year for me: my asthma worsens and, at times, becomes life threatening. Our family vacations usually involve at least one medical emergency - I'm always the culprit.

Last summer, we had to cut short our time in France after I got sick. By the time we made it to the ferry, I was halfway to hypoxia. Maybe a little more than halfway - I can remember feeling deliriously pleased that I had enough French to ask: "Y a-t-il un docteur à bord?"

In any case, they responded with admirable haste, and I was hustled off to sickbay, where I spent the next several hours improving my French in the company of a very charming nurse.

Sadly, there were no French lessons for me when I got back to Bristol yesterday, just the NHS. Now, mostly recovered but with the family still away, I'm left rattling around the house on my own.

Expect some blogging.

Treasured memories

Mac and I are taking the two young ones camping this weekend.

Young ones? Who am I trying to kid!? They're 7 and 10 now - big boys. And my eldest is 16. How did that happen? Sometimes, it seems like the years have just flown by. And it won't be long now 'til they're all grown up and gone.

Here's another father thinking on the same subject as his son approaches his thirteenth birthday.

It seemed just a moment ago when he was a little boy. Now, in just a few days, Jackson would become a teen-ager. The time was not far off when he will be too big a kid for me to kiss him goodnight. The time was not far off when he will not be down the hall at all.

"There will come a time – and terribly sooner than I would realize – when I would give anything to have Jackson down the hall, in his room, waiting for me to come and kiss him goodnight. I would give anything to have a time machine, to be able to come back in time to just this moment right now, to be able to have him there in his bed in his room, to kiss him good night just one more time.

I don't imagine this weekend will be the last time the boys and I go camping together. But I do know that many of the things I, too often, take for granted today are tomorrow's treasured memories.

Catch 'em while you can.

(With thanks to Joe Katzman at Winds of Change for the link.)

Poetry corner

Punks and poets

The Academy of American Poets has recently overhauled its website Poetry.org, which is where I found an article by Chad Davidison called Got Punked: Rebellious Verse.

The title caught my eye, and I was looking forward to reading it. As it happens, it's way too cerebral for my liking.

Punk, though it celebrated its own death, is constantly reborn. Poetry, too, is continually redefining itself, continually resisting its own intelligence. Iggy Pop pops up in Jim Jarmusch films. Ziggy Stardust might be dead, but Bowie isn’t. And the artistic androgyny Bowie embodied? What better way to represent Keatsian "negative capability" or Eliotic "extinction of personality"? Punk lives long enough to annihilate itself, then repeats the feat like a god at the center of a harvest myth.

Mmm. I'm guessing Davidson's never seen a punk poet like John Cooper Clarke in action.

The Rough Guide to Rock described Clarke's high-speed delivery as being "based on the rhythms of rock and amphetamine sulphate rather than any conventional poetic metre" - that about captures it. Stark and direct, it was "the verbal equivalent of the headlong musical thrill of punk."

John Cooper Clarke is better heard than read: if you get the chance to see him live, take it - it's an experience. In the meantime, try "Beasley Street".

In the cheap seats where murder breeds
somebody is out of breath
Sleep is a luxury they don't need
... a sneak preview of death
Belladonna is your flower
Manslaughter is your meat
Spend a year in a couple of hours
on the edge of Beasley street

Like they say, read the whole thing.

Talking religion

There's a lively discussion going on over at Harry's Place following this post from David T about attacks on religious belief.

[T]o take a position of absolute condemnation in relation to any mainstream religious ideology is rarely anything other than disproportionate and phobic.

I think he's right. And there's a fine example of a disproportionate and phobic response in the comments - one commenter recommends the desecration of religious books as a kind of shock therapy for believers, on the grounds that:

Most religion is a form of mental illness, and the sooner that here and now, in the 21st century, that the mental illness corcerned is wiped out or cured, the better humankind will be.

Funny really, that's kind of like the way some people feel about socialism.

Planet Monbiot

Via the Daily Ablution. George Monbiot channeling the spirit of environmentalism in yesterday's Guardian:

Everything we thought was good turns out also to be bad. It is an act of kindness to travel to your cousin's wedding. Now it is also an act of cruelty. It is a good thing to light the streets at night. Climate change tells us it kills more people than it saves. We are killing people by the most innocent means: turning on the lights, taking a bath, driving to work, going on holiday. Climate change demands a reversal of our moral compass, for which we are plainly unprepared.

Thankfully, the ancient sages, long ago, addressed such questions. As Lao Tzu might have said:

Give up washing,
Renounce illumination,
And it will be 10,000 times better for everyone.

Give up holidays,
Renounce mobility,
And people will rediscover global harmony and love.

Or something.

Fisking fashion

Hugh Green at Most Sincerely Folks has done a fine fisk on an article from Marie Claire magazine about Muslim women and the burqa.

He realizes it's a hopeless exercise:

Railing against the opinions on head covering expressed in the column of a women’s magazine that makes quite a lot of money advertising shampoos and cosmetics is a bit like railing against the characters in an episode of Dynasty for a lack of moral agency.

Hopeless or not, it's highly readable.

What's that noise?

My afternoon blogging session was briefly interrupted a few minutes ago when I heard some shouting from the street.

By the time I got downstairs, Mac was already on the phone to the police. A violent assault was taking place right in front of the house.

Outside, two cars (both full of young men) were pulled over. One of the drivers was out of his vehicle and lashing violently at the other driver, who having half-opened his door, was struggling to protect himself.

It didn't stop there. The guy returns to his vehicle, brings out a steel nightstick and starts swinging it into the front of his victim's car. Just bashing it in! And all the time, he's screaming obscenities at the top of his voice.

Then, like it never happened, he gets back in his car and drives away.

Just thought I’d share that with you. Got to wonder what Dave would make of it all.

Critical malfunction

I just don't understand it.

Michele makes a list of "The Definitive, Never Snobby, Unpretentious, Ridicule-Ready ASV 100 Movies of All Time". And she leaves out "My Cousin Vinny"!

What was she thinking?

Hypocritical correctness

Marcus Brigstocke, writing in today's Guardian, says that the "straight, white, able-bodied, Christian, PC-phobic majority" should stop going on about political correctness.

Accusations of politically correct thought control have become a pathetic and transparent excuse for lazy racists, sexists and Islamophobes the land over. Challenging PC has become a game of chicken for bigots - daring each other to run out into the busy PC motorway and say something stupid before dashing back for cover.

Let's stand that on its head (we'll get nearer the truth):

Accusations of racism, sexism and Islamophobia against those who criticize political correctness have become a pathetic and transparent excuse for lazy media elites the world over. Defending PC has become a game of chicken for idiots - daring each other to run out into the busy mainstream and shout some insults before dashing back for cover.

There are valid and cogent criticisms of political correctness, particularly in so far as it impinges on freedom of speech. Ignoring these issues and resorting to name-calling does nothing to advance discussion. But then maybe I'm taking Brigstocke too seriously. After all, he's a joker not a thinker.

But, while I'm at it, what really rankles about Brigstocke's piece is that, after condemning racists and bigots in his opening paragraphs, he goes on to use a couple of pretty offensive characterizations in writing about his fellow Europeans.

In pursuing his point, Brigstocke imagines "some greasy, lank-haired French lad called Didier [...] wearing his rucksack on his front" and "some piggy-faced blond boy called Heinrich [who] came and ate everything in your fridge". Is that really the politically correct way to talk about one's neighbors?

Rank hypocrisy or postmodern humor? Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

Blaming Lucas

Why has the latest Star Wars trilogy been such a disappointment?

Smash has the answer.

Life, liberty & psychiatry

I spent my time as an undergraduate studying psychology, sociology and philosophy. It didn't get me very far - I was majoring in Accounting and Finance. After two years at college, bored with my course, I took a sabbatical and got a job as a nursing assistant on the psychiatric ward of a large general hospital.

The ward was designed to be a short-stay unit - none of the patients were supposed to spend longer than six months there. The idea being, within that time, the patient would be either discharged or transferred to long-term care. In reality, many of the patients had been on the ward for over a year, but none of the nurses had been there longer than six months. When I left to go back to university, I was the longest serving member of staff on the unit.

The place was understaffed, the nurses were undertrained and inexperienced, the doctors all but invisible, and the whole set-up was poorly resourced. Hardly an environment conducive to the relief of mental distress.

I suspect the lack of funding for psychiatric services is due, at least in part, to the social stigma attached to mental illness. Even today, the pervasive prejudice towards people with psychological problems seriously distorts public responses to mental health issues.

As an example, do a search for "schizophrenic" on BBC News and you'll get a list of murder reports, not news of recent medical advances or human interest stories. Or look at the way ASBOs are being used to manage the "anti-social" behavior of people with mental conditions. As the Observer reported on Sunday, some sufferers are in danger of being jailed if they publicly display symptoms.

Or take the Human Rights Act, which recognizes "the right to liberty and security of person" but explicitly denies that right to "persons of unsound mind" - a clause the British government seems keen to take advantage of with its proposals to ban people with mental health problems from leaving their homes.

It's like an old friend of mine once said: Human rights are a fine thing in principle. But how human do you have to be to get them?

Foreign affairs

Last week, the Big Fella was explaining some board game to his friends at school. "It's great!" he tells them. "And you get to play Uncle Joe." Blank faces from his friends, so my boy elucidates: "Uncle Joe! You know - Stalin." More blank looks. The Big Fella was flummoxed.

Friday after school, still astonished by it all, he says to me: "How can anyone get to be ten years old and not know who Stalin was!?"

He's got a point. They've all heard of Hitler. Why does Stalin get a pass?

Schlock horror

What is going on at the Social Affairs Unit?

First, Orac at Respectful Insolence points out some anti-evolutionary posturing from history professor William D. Rubinstein.

Then, S J Masty pops up claiming Hollywood is to blame for Abu Ghraib and for rampant police brutality in the US - seems it all started with "Death Wish".

The abuses carried out by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib are not a one-off. Such abuses are widespread and are a product of the culture fostered by American movies and cop shows, which glorify law breaking by the "righteous" in order to achieve "justice".

Focussing on police brutality in the US, Masty says he knows of "no American who denies that a nasty, unnecessarily authoritarian and bullying cop-culture is afoot across America". (Really? Not one?) And...

My elderly relatives, retired to Florida, [...] now complain that every 82-year-old, retired gynaecologist pulled over for a burned-out tail-light on his Oldsmobile is handcuffed, manhandled, hit or kicked, and occasionally knocked to the ground once or twice for good measure. Once noticed by the police, he becomes a "perp" and forfeits his rights.

Staid, middle-aged doctors in Michigan are afraid to write letters to newspapers complaining about local government for fear of being persecuted by the state, mostly by police or regulatory investigators. Accurate or not, their fear is genuine.

"Accurate or not"!? Is he kidding? Read it all - it's the worst piece of schlock I've come across in a long time.

I don't know where I got the idea, but I thought the Social Affairs Unit was a think tank. Obviously not.

What a picture

Oliver Kamm provides an extract from Christopher Hitchens's portrait of George Galloway in today's Independent.

It's not pretty.

Worked out

Nothing from me today - I'm burnt out after an afternoon spent delving into the legislation underpinning local authority regulations. If you haven't read the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976, don't.

Mañana.

Chance meeting

I've been in Bristol for over twenty years now. One of the advantages of living in one place for so long is that I quite often bump into people I haven't seen for years.

Recently, quite by chance, I met up with someone I used to know when I first moved to Bristol. He's now the Deputy Lord-Lieutenant (cute title). Fifteen to twenty years ago, we were both active in promoting local regeneration initiatives in Bristol's inner city, particularly in the St Pauls neighborhood, home to many of the city's Afro-Caribbean population.

Since those days, things have changed a lot for both of us, but some of the problems in St Pauls have gotten worse, thanks largely to the influx of crack-cocaine.

Anyway, back in the eighties, both of us had read and admired "Endless Pressure", Ken Pryce's groundbreaking study of West Indian lifestyles in Bristol. It was essential reading for outsiders like me doing development work in the area, and it was widely appreciated locally for its accurate depiction of Afro-Caribbean life in the city.

I was dimly aware that Ken Pryce had done other studies, but I never thought much about it, except occasionally to wonder why I hadn’t come across more of his work. Yesterday, I found out why.

My former colleague told me that, some years ago, Pryce had been doing a study on drug dealing in Jamaica and had been found dead, face down in some ditch somewhere, a victim of the violent subculture he’d been studying.

Today, I’m left sadly reflecting that the advent of crack-cocaine, along with the gang violence that accompanied it, not only derailed many of the hopes we had for the inner city twenty years ago, it also took the life of a fine sociologist who, had he lived, might have done much to document and explain the culture that killed him.

Language blogs

Language Log has a roundup of posts from blogging linguists.

Following the links, I learnt that the Chinese word for 'crisis' is not a compound of the words for 'danger' and 'opportunity', 3,000 of the 6,000-7,000 currently used human languages are headed for extinction, John Betjeman and C. S. Lewis fell out over Coleridge's pants, and Google library ninjas have launched virulent attacks on European culture (or not, as the case may be).

Learning the difference

Damian Counsell, in an excellent post exploring learned responses to human difference, notes that ”humans are naturally disposed to discriminate against members of other tribes."

I think that's right.

And as Damian says, understanding the basis of prejudice doesn’t excuse racism, it allows us “to acknowledge our flaw, resist its effects, and build a world where those who express it are put at a disadvantage.”

Celebrity blogger

You know, sometimes, you can think you really understand somebody. And then, you read their blog and realize you don't really know them at all.

Infamous address

Richard Luscombe, writing for Scotland on Sunday, reports that developers are looking to build a casino complex close to the Gettysburg battlefield.

It's not a new story - the Associated Press piece on which it was based appeared over a week ago and was carried in the Sun-Sentinel. But what is new in Luscombe's treatment of the story is his reference to Lincoln's "infamous Gettysburg Address".

Infamous? Well, it wasn't applauded in certain quarters at the time - the Chicago Times referred to it as a "silly, flat, and dishwatery utterance". But to calll it "infamous" smacks of either ignorance or a particularly skewed perspective.

Or haste - perhaps Luscombe was just cutting and pasting from some other source. I was surprised to find that Google shows 140 results for ""infamous Gettysburg address" including, astonishingly, The History Channel.

Unbelievable!

Legitimate target

Madeleine Bunting's opinion pieces for the Guardian usually leave me speechless. Yesterday's column, "Honour and Martyrdom", (in which Bunting argues that western revulsion at suicide bombings is somehow inappropriate) was no exception.

Thankfully, Norm Geras has both the words and the patience to address Bunting's conflated arguments and strange sympathies.

[N]ot one of her factors of supposed explanation addresses the thing she really needs to address about suicide bombing, namely, why moral revulsion isn't the right response to the deliberate murder and injury of innocent people in furtherance of a political cause. For it is sacrificing them: depriving them of, or wrecking, their lives, as a mere instrumentality towards some putatively desirable end, which is sometimes remote, sometimes, even, impossible to achieve. It is a crime against those so sacrificed, a crime under international law, and a crime against humanity by codes and conventions now universally recognized.

Except, of course, that such codes and conventions are not recognized by those whose moral relativism allows the conclusion that one person's "innocent civilian" is another's "legitimate target".

Images of war

Over the weekend, Channel 4 will be showing “100 Greatest War Films”. The viewers poll has now closed but you can take a look at the nominees – and be surprised at some of the inclusions.

I won’t be watching the broadcast. I’m a fan of the genre, but I can’t sit through those clip-compilation shows without getting itchy.

Anyhow, here are five war movies I really like, all but the last one made it on to Channel 4’s list of nominees:

All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930)
Mrs Miniver (William Wyler, 1942)
Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942)
Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)
Attack! (Robert Aldrich, 1956)

I’m not surprised that last one wasn't nominated - it’s too stagey and melodramatic for modern tastes. But a few of the IMDB reviews do it justice.

Little monkeys

Seven and ten years old, and already they're engaging in political satire: Spud does a great Bob Dole impression and the Big Fella's Nixon is near perfect.

I'd be worried if I didn't know which Simpsons' episodes they were aping.

Growing pains

Did I tell you Mac's got an allotment? Well she has. And right now, she's also got a bad back. So it looks like I'll be doing the digging this weekend.

I hate digging - there's too much deferred gratification involved for my liking. And besides, my father's generation gave up on farming; I'm free of romantic notions about going back to the land. But Mac's a wizard when it comes to growing stuff, and I'm looking forward to some choice produce this summer.

Unfortunately, most of the top fruit won't produce until next year - we'll have to wait until 2006 for the blackcurrant sorbets. As for the rest of it, there'll be Charlotte and pink fir-apple potatoes this season, purple-sprouting and Romanesque broccoli, Tuscan cabbage, fennel, celeriac, rocket and more broad beans than we'll know what to do with.

But to get all that - this weekend, I have to dig, and deal with compost and worm bins and such like. Isn't nature wonderful!

If you're out and about this weekend, look for me here.



I'll be up on the left somewhere. Feel free to lend a hand.

Manchester buccaneer

BBC News reports that Michael Glazer, owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is proceeding with his bid to take control of Manchester United Football Club.

Local fans are not happy. Supporters' associations have been running a "Not for Sale" campaign in an attempt to defeat Glazer's bid for the club, and now they're gutted.

Nick Towle, chairman of fans' pressure group, Shareholders United, claimed he has ripped up his season ticket.

He said: "I am very sad - I still love the club but I refuse to put a penny into the company. And I believe as many as 20,000 fans may also leave Man Utd."

That sounds like wishful thinking to me. But the fans' anger is real enough.

Opposition to Glazer centers around both the structure of the bid (it's highly leveraged and could lead to higher ticket prices), and his future plans for the club (which seem unclear).

I'm not sure what to make of it all, but the Guardian is suggesting that United manager, Alex Ferguson, is "repulsed by the prospect" of working with Glazer and is thinking about resigning.

My ten-year-old says it's all good news. But I think that's because he supports Liverpool.

Continuing evolution

A few days ago Susanna over at Cut on the Bias wrote a post characterizing the decision by scientists to boycott the KSBE hearings on intelligent design as an attempt to silence critics of evolutionary theory and stifle debate.

Susanna, also noted that the fever to debunk intelligent design was so widespread amongst evolutionists that one of them had even attempted to debunk a satirical piece by Scott Orr. (Debunking satire!? Ye Gods! Is nothing sacred?)

Yesterday, Susanna found she'd been labelled an apologist for intelligent design and her post well and truly debunked. Predictably enough, by the same blogger she'd cited for debunking Scrappleface - Orac at Respectful Insolence.

And what a debunking! Like Susanna says:

He has me for breakfast, lunch, dinner and a couple of snacks too, but still manages to leave a little for a few friends to gnaw on.

Snark aside, Orac's post is an excellent rehearsal of the arguments against intelligent design - but there's an awful lot of snark to wade through before you get to the good bits.

However, his conclusion is starkly concise: (they're his italics)

The bottom line is that ID has utterly failed to gain a foothold in biology as serious science the way that every accepted scientific theory ultimately becomes accepted: through the preponderance of evidence and through the theory's ability to unify, explain, and to some extent predict natural phenomenon.

[...]

If ID advocates really want to get their concepts introduced into the classroom as science, then the best way to do it is to divert some of that massive money and effort used to bulldoze various initiatives forcing the teaching of ID as "science" in high schools and use it to produce the goods. Do the research. Show scientists the evidence. Publish the research and evidence in peer-reviewed journals. Present it at national meetings of biologists. Show how ID explains the diversity of life better than (or at least as well as) evolutionary theory does.

To my mind, unless and until that happens, intelligent design should have no role in informing science standards in our schools.

In the meantime, those with a taste for satire might enjoy Language Log's take on it all.

Poetry corner

Franklin P. Adams

Us Poets

Wordsworth wrote some tawdry stuff;
Much of Moore I have forgotten;
Parts of Tennyson are guff;
Bits of Byron, too, are rotten.

All of Browning isn't great;
There are slipshod lines in Shelley;
Every one knows Homer's fate;
Some of Keats is vermicelli.

Sometimes Shakespeare hit the slide,
Not to mention Pope or Milton;
Some of Southey's stuff is snide.
Some of Spenser's simply Stilton.

When one has to boil the pot,
One can't always watch the kittle.
You may credit it or not--
Now and then _I_ slump a little!

From "Tobogganing on Parnassus" by Franklin P. Adams

Nowadays, Franklin Adams is little remembered. But, between the wars, he was a prominent New York columnist and a leading member of the Algonquin Round Table - he once said of Dorothy Parker that he had "raised her from a couplet".

In his humorous column, "The Conning Tower", Adams frequently published readers' contributions and assiduously promoted new writers, including James Thurber and Eugene O'Neil.

These days, his aphorisms are sometimes quoted but his light verse is all but forgotten. Which is a shame, because some of it is delightful (To a Thesaurus being a fine example).

Talking movies

Via Michael Totten: Dr Frank has a review of Ridley Scott's new movie:

Kingdom of Heaven asks a question that has plagued historians for decades: what would happen if a late 20th-century, secular, agnostic, multiculturalist, progressive, sensitive Hollywood type were to be transported back in time to participate in one of history's grandest spectacles? Could one of the most embarrassingly culturally insensitive chapters of our history be rewritten or perhaps even avoided altogether, through the efforts of one determined, sensitive man who is as open-minded about stuff as we are?

Read on.

Random quote

I have no bumperstickers, for the same reason I do not paste editorials with which I agree on the seat of my pants.

James Lileks.

Random picture

Reasonable disagreement

I was following bits of the BlogNashville conference, particularly the session on “How to disagree without being disagreeable". Unfortunately, it sounds like the workshop wasn't an agreeable experience for some of the participants. And the wrangling over the fall-out seems to be getting a little out of hand.

So what went wrong? How did the disagreement begin and why did it become so, erm..., disagreeable?

When conference sessions go wrong (and believe me, I've seen some lulus), it's tough not to blame the participants, but I'd like to focus instead on the process. Because, it seems to me, a number of process factors were so wrong here that, regardless of the personalities involved, a positive outcome for all concerned was not a likely event.

In particular, there seems to have been a lack of fit between participants' expectations of the session and what they actually got.

The write-up suggests that the session may have been intended as a social experiment "challenging an audience of bloggers to respectfully disagree with one another", as well as an attempt to arrive at "a set of shared values that may be suggested as guidelines for the blogging community."

From the information provided beforehand, participants might have reasonably anticipated the latter but would have been ill-prepared for a challenging social experiment.

Confusion and conflict are predictable outcomes of role-ambiguity. In this instance, there seemed to be confusion around the session leader's role in the discussion. Was the group expecting to be moderated or led? Was the session leader required to lecture or facilitate? Open discussion or focussed debate? Or something else entirely?

It doesn't look to me like this issue was explicitly resolved either before or during the discussion. Frustration and conflict with the leader were characteristic of the session and continue to overshadow the post-mortem debate.

I certainly don't want to get involved in any of that. But I do think more attention to process would have likely reduced the possibility of conflict.

As to the question of how to disagree without being disagreeable, my advice is simple: Don't disagree with people who don't want to be disagreed with.

Update
Dave Winer points to a BloggerCon page that provides background on the role of discussion leaders at the conference.

It not only demonstrates a concern for process (so scratch my remarks to the contrary above), it also clearly sets out the role of the discussion leader as being that of both reporter and editor.

As Winer describes it, the role of the discussion leader is to be both "a reporter who is creating a story with quotes from the people in the room" and an editor "so if he or she feels that a point has been made they must move on to the next point quickly. No droning, no filibusters, no repeating an idea over and over."

It's a fascinating and challenging structure, casting the discussion leader as storyteller, required to weave a narrative from diverse contributions. I've seen it used in other contexts, most entertainingly at a European bankers' conference where, over three days, a professional storyteller mixed with the participants, eliciting contributions before combining them in a compelling (and highly amusing) narrative for the conference finale.

Anyway, thanks to Winer, I now have a better understanding of the BloggerCon process and, referring back to the point of my original post, it doesn't look now like process was the problem.

Of course, having learnt a little more about them, I'm keener than ever to get along to one of these blogger conferences.

Maybe one day.

Radio Martini

Take equal measures of vanity and nostalgia, top up with vodka, add a microphone and stir vigorously. What do you get?

I'm not sure but I think we're about to find out - Stephen Green is looking at podcasting.

Mental hygiene

Scott Burgess is back at The Daily Ablution after a couple of weeks off.

He's been reading the Independent again. I guess somebody's go to do it.

So farewell then

David Aaronovitch in his last column for the Guardian:

Since I decided, in January 2003, that if Iraq was invaded I would not oppose it, I have had the almost astral experience of finding myself excommunicated from the movement, sometimes by fellow journalists who I know do not possess a political bone in their entire bodies.

All of a sudden I began to experience the left from the outside. And the first thing that struck me was its capacity for smug certainty and uniformity of response.

I have to say it: Read the whole thing. If only because Aaronovitch's experience accords with my own and will, I'm sure, be eerily familiar to those on the left who supported the liberation of Iraq.

I've come to regard Aaronovitch as one of the few voices of sanity at the Guardian. He has been, at times, thoughtful and incisive. And aside from the occasional lapse into pomposity (surely excusable in a man of such girth) highly readable.

He'll be back in June at the Times.

Evolving standards

The Washington Post reports that the Kansas State Board of Education is, once again, considering changes to science standards that will allow teachers to present the idea of intelligent design as a scientifically respectable alternative to the theory of biological evolution.

Not surprisingly, the American Association for the Advancement of Science is opposed to the changes on the basis "that the lack of scientific warrant for so-called 'intelligent design theory' makes it improper to include as a part of science education".

I strongly agree. I don't object to notions of intelligent design being taught in philosophy classes. But unless a theory has gained wide acceptance within the scientific community, I can't see how it can sensibly be used to inform science standards.

But then, I'm not in Kansas.

Imperial games

Roger Simon points to a piece in the New York Times suggesting that the history of cricket's development as an international game may offer lessons for the promotion of democracy abroad.

It's an interesting idea. As is the article's contention that: "Cricket lost ground in North America because of the egalitarian ethos of its societies." That's a new one on me. But it sounds a lot like the old saw that Americans don't play much cricket because we're temperamentally unsuited to the game.

As I've said before, I think the explanation is simple - cricket withered in the US after 1898 when the British-controlled Imperial Cricket Conference effectively excluded the US team from first-class international competition.

No lesson in democracy there then.

Kos abroad

I learnt yesterday that the Daily Kos has been snooping around these parts: Markos Moulitsas has been in Bristol reporting on the election for the Guardian.

Bristol West is a key marginal that could go any one of three ways, and Moulitsas covers all the bases in a straightforward piece of reporting. It makes a change from some of his posts on the Guardian's election blog, which have seemed to me either ingratiatingly cliched:

We Americans are cursed with an inarticulate president, studiously avoiding a castrated press corps, which - when given the chance - is unable or unwilling to ask any tough questions lest they have all access cut. So forgive us for feeling a tad bit - nay, a great deal - jealous about your prime minister and your press corps.

Or simply clueless:

I won't pretend to know what this all means, but it was refreshing being at a political rally in which people did not feel compelled to wear their patriotism on their sleeve. Brits are obviously patriotic people, yet self-assured enough that gaudy displays of nationalism are not necessary.

At least in the second example, his commenters provide some much needed context.

In any case, he fits right in at the Guardian.

Smashing Paredes

Blog-journalism, participant observation or improvisational street theatre?

It's a little of all three as Citizen Smash confronts Pablo Paredes at the San Diego Earth Fair.

Work in progress

I'm supposed to be redecorating the study. But instead, I'm messing around with my stylesheet and uploading different versions, trying to pick a new look for the blog.

So, apologies if it gets a bit gawdy around here today.

Band of Brothers

I've just finished watching the first two episodes of 'Band of Brothers' - they're re-running it on UK TV Drama. It's the second time round for me. The first time I watched it, I went straight out and bought the book by Stephen Ambrose on which the series is based.

Earlier today, I caught a couple of David Adesnik posts rightly praising the series but also (strangely, to my mind) handing out demerits on the basis that Band of Brothers does not adequately address issues of racial and religious prejudice.

First and foremost, in ten hours of action and dialogue, there isn't a single negative remark made about blacks or homosexuals.
In the first couple of episodes, BoB makes a big deal about the tensions caused by a very specific set of ethnic and religious differences. [...] But after that, everything is just peachy.

So what's going on here? Aren't Hollywood liberals like Spielberg and Hanks supposed to be reminding us of the dark side of American history, of our betrayal of our own democratic ideals? In general, yes. But not when the subject of discussion is The Greatest Generation. Because they are perfect. Because they live in a timeless land that has never heard of partisan politics.

As the series is essentially a straightforward dramatization of Ambrose's book, Adesnik concludes that "the demerits given to the filmmakers above belong partly to the author of the book, Stephen Ambrose."

I think this criticism of Ambrose is way off the mark for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, if there's a fault, it's in the source material. Ambrose's book is not a work of fiction - it's based on the personal recollections of a group of men who served together in the 101st Airborne. It's their story, not Ambrose's.

Secondly, and more importantly, Ambrose has not ignored issues of prejudice and segregation in his other work. In 'Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army From the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany', Ambrose pulls no punches in detailing the experiences of African-American servicemen:

The world's greatest democracy fought the world's greatest racist with a segregated Army. It was worse than that: the Army and the society conspired to degrade African-Americans in every way possible, summed up in the name Jim Crow. One little incident from the home front illustrates the tyranny black Americans lived under during the Second World War.

In April 1944 Corp. Rupert Timmingham wrote Yank magazine. "Here is a question that each Negro soldier is asking," he began. "What is the Negro soldier fighting for? On whose team are we playing?" He recounted the difficulties he and eight other black soldiers had while traveling through the South -- "where Old Jim Crow rules" -- for a new assignment. "We could not purchase a cup of coffee," Timmingham noted. Finally the lunchroom manager at a Texas railroad depot said the black GIs could go on around back to the kitchen for a sandwich and coffee. As they did, "about two dozen German prisoners of war, with two American guards, came to the station. They entered the lunchroom, sat at the tables, had their meals served, talked, smoked, in fact had quite a swell time. I stood on the outside looking on, and I could not help but ask myself why are they treated better than we are? Why are we pushed around like cattle? If we are fighting for the same thing, if we are to die for our country, then why does the Government allow such things to go on?"

You can read more of the same here.

Flying days

Well, we survived a weekend under canvas, the highlight of which turned out to be a visit to the National Birds of Prey Centre.

For me, the best bit was getting close to a female Bald Eagle. For Mac, it was the flying demonstration - watching a range of Raptors being flown from the hand, including a Peregrine Falcon and a Eurasian Eagle Owl. But it was the Red Kite that Mac fell in love with. She wants to go back and fly one herself!

Happily, it looks like she's going to get the opportunity this summer. Mac's birthday is coming up, and one of the center's Falconry Experience Days sounds like an ideal present.

By the way, here's something I didn't know: while the Old World vultures are related to hawks and eagles, the New World vultures are more closely related to storks. It's another example of convergent evolution, the most intriguing illustration of which is the Tasmanian Wolf.