Russell Davies played Mark Steyn’s latest single last Sunday (you have about 18 hours to hear it). Yes, that Mark Steyn. Davies says that when Steyn wrote about music he found him to be right about just about everything, but that when he turned to politics “I was going to have to look a lot harder to find any political common ground with him”. This comment perhaps explains even more than the music he plays why I never miss Davies’s show; it’s the music that explains why I am always careful to do so when no-one else is around (my wife and daughters ridicule me for listening to “show tunes” which is how they carelessly refer to it; let’s hope that the little lad has better taste).
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Harry
From the amazing BFI Archive on youtube.
[click to continue…]
Anyone who’s going to be at the Eastern Division APA meetings this year shouldn’t miss the Society for Applied Philosophy session “Applying Philosophy” with Virginia Held and Adam Swift. It’s on the Monday morning at 11.15 am. Any session at the APA faces a lot of competition (as you can see from the full program here). But questions about what it means to apply philosophy, especially normative philosophy often arise around here, and I think there is still enough uncertainty about, for example, what non-ideal theorising amounts to and how it relates to ideal theorising, that the session should be excellent, not just for the presentations, but for the ensuing discussion, if enough people attend.
A new web resource called Homeschooling Research and Scholarship has just come online, courtesy of Rob Kunzman of the Indiana University School of Education. He’s gathered together a vast array of academic resources concerning homeschooling because, as he says:
while many homeschool organizations and advocacy groups provide information and analysis, there are few places to go for a less partisan perspective.
Below the fold are the three key points he asks all journalists to read before starting to use the resource (I’ve cut some bits out, so its still worth reading his page). Can I suggest that responsible people might also link not to this post, but to Rob’s site, both to spread the word and to improve his google rating (if it really works that way) and, (very) eventually, public discourse about homeschooling.
Talking of made up family traditions, Staffordshire Oatcakes a la Brighouse Mothersname household are a nice light-ish alternative to regular pancakes. I was first served them as a teenager by the Leek, Staffs, native parents of a friend of my sister’s; then completely forgot about them until coming across them in a children’s story several years ago. You’re supposed to use half medium oatmeal (scottish oatmeal in the US) and half regular flour, but I prefer to use oat flour with just a couple of spoons of medium oatmeal for texture. I make them when my eldest has friends over for sleepovers and they are always popular; I make the batter the night before, and its all ready to cook in the morning. You can serve them with butter and syrup (Golden Syrup
1 teaspoon dried yeast
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
3 cups oat flour and 3 tablespoons of medium/scottish oatmeal
2 cups water and 2 cups milk
(or 4 cups of liquid, with milk and water in whatever proportion you want, really).
2 tablespoons of melted butter
Dissolve the yeast and sugar into the liquid, and leave covered for 10 minutes.
Add all the other ingredients except the butter, and whisk thoroughly so there are no lumps.
Leave in a mixing bowl, covered with plastic wrap, for at least an hour (overnight is fine; 2 days is fine, frankly) in a not-too-warm place.
Just before cooking, mix in the melted butter. Cook like pancakes on a moderate griddle in butter. Serve immediately (or keep them in a hot oven, but don’t stack them, please). You can add more flour, or more liquid, any time you want, to get the consistency you prefer; this recipe should make the consistency a bit thicker than crepes.
I rarely read bestsellers. I’d like to think that it is because I’m a snob, but the truth is that it is mainly because I lack the sense of urgency needed to trigger the purchase/acquisition. They’re bestsellers for goodness sake, which means there are tens of thousands of them around and they’ll be widely reviewed, so if, in a few years time, they still seem good and relevant I can get hold of them then and see what I think. I read two this year. I’ll write about Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
Guardian Obit here. Picture gallery here. Dragon’s Friendly Society here. The Clangers, Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine here
When my eldest was 5 there was just one thing on her Christmas list. A Clanger. And Father Christmas brought her a little cuddly clanger and a soup dragon. Boy was she happy. For several years there was a promise that Noggin the Nog would come out on DVD, but there was delay after delay, during which I feared that by the time it came out my kids would be too old for it. It was too late for my eldest, but just in time for the middle one, and we had a third so that a second one would get to enjoy them.
During the great debate over my son’s name the way my wife and the girls got me to accede to their preference was by pointing out that if we named him as we did he would share his first name with Oliver Postgate. Clever.
A taste of Noggin the Nog, the best thing ever on television, here.
The UW School of Medicine and Public Health has just adopted a new grading policy; for first year students it has gotten rid of public letter grades, replacing them with a Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory division. You can read a bit about it here. In fact, the students do get assigned letter grades, but these do not appear on their transcript. The Wisconsin Association of Scholars asked me to participate in an event at the School this week, where we would simultaneously discuss the new policy (the Dean of the School was on the panel) and launch Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education
Via Leiter, this disturbing story about gnomes being banned from a church cemetery. This is the CofE: it seems a bit ironic that a church that not long ago had Bishops openly doubting whether God exists is so adamant about the non-existence of ‘real’ gnomes.
The excellent Broader, Bolder Approach Coalition has a nice “gotcha” for David Brooks here. In the first piece he endorses pretty much exactly the approach that the broader bolder coalition has outlined; in the second he criticises the coalition and supports instead, the Education Equality Project (you know, the Al Sharpton one that John McCain supports) which was, as far as I can tell, set up specifically to oppose the broader bolder approach that he advances in his first article. Good stuff.
Talking of the 70’s, I just finished Kenneth Morgan’s biography of Michael Foot
The book is full of surprises – even if some of them are ones that you vaguely knew before, but hadn’t really believed. His friendship with, and sponsorship by, Beaverbrook, was just the tip of an iceberg. I didn’t know that Foot became, in later life, a close friend of Ian Gilmour. I did, somehow, know that he was a friend of Enoch Powell’s, but it is surprising nevertheless, and what is particularly surprising is that they seem to have become friends, on Foot’s initiative, shortly after the “rivers of blood” speech (Radio 4 had a very good evaluation of Powell last year, during which the son of some Tory MP told about how his parents, previously good friends of Powell’s, turned Powell away from the door the day after the speech, and never spoke to him again, which indicates just how unacceptable the speech was). They collaborated closely both on defeating House of Lords reform (Foot wanted it abolished, not turned into a House of place-men), and, obviously, opposing entry to, and then staying in, the EEC. Another close friend was Randolph Churchill, who twice challenged him in Devonport; they became friends, apparently, during the first campaign, when Foot and Jill Craigie would frequently give Churchill rides back from events where his Conservative election workers, who disliked him, had abandoned him. The second campaign was, apparently, vicious, and yet the friendship remained solid. A lifelong Republican, who has refused any and all honours, he became friends with the Queen when he was party leader, and also with the Queen Mother, who apparently admired his good sense in wearing his donkey jacket to the Cenotaph for the Remembrance ceremony. There’s better still: some MI5 report is quoted as saying the Foot, Benn, Mikardo, Driberg, Heffer, Hart, Castle and David Owen were “Labour MPs who are believed to be Communists and are in positions of influence”. Brilliant.
If you had any doubt that we were back in the seventies, the I learned today from the BBC iplayer, that they have resurrected Terry Nation’s apocalyptic series Survivors. Even the leading characters have their original names (though I gather there are major plot differences). Here’s the script for the first episode. Here’s the website, and here’s the blog. The brilliant original is on DVD 
Terry Gross had Bill Ayers on Fresh Air last week. The page is here, or you can cut straight to the show.
As I indicated in my comments on The Company You Keep, I am not pre-disposed to be sympathetic to Weather or its members, being inclined to see the turn to violence in a liberal democracy as not only elitist and self-indulgent, but also reckless about the effects on other people on the left. I am not a pacifist, and understand that sometimes violence is legitimate if there is a prospect of it preventing something much worse; the idea that a campaign of violence by a small group of leftists could have contributed to ending the Vietnam War seems as fantastic to me. My own political formation took place much later (I’m younger even than Obama), but none of my friends who were politically active on the far left in the 60’s and remain active today have a good opinion of Weather, and their views of the matter lead me to suspect that had I been around then my disposition to them would be more actively hostile than it, in fact, is.
But during the campaign I was struck, and rather impressed, by the discipline with which Ayers refrained from taking advantage of the moment for his own ends.
Richard Rothstein’s new book Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right
just got added to my short list of books about education that everyone should read. I presume that EPI has put it in the hands of everyone in Congress, but it might be worth, after reading it yourself, passing it on to a local school board member. Whereas a lot of criticism of NCLB amounts to little more than an unbalanced rant and I would say that most criticism is unconstructive, Grading Education offers a comprehensive, compelling, and constructive critique. It’s comprehensive in that it places NCLB within a (very interesting) discussion of the history of evaluation of schools, and constructive, not in the sense that it suggests a way to fix NCLB (that, the authors say, is impossible) but rather by offering a sensible alternative framework for “getting accountability right”. The authors believe (rightly) that accountability is important, and (again rightly) that the particular method of democratic accountability through locally elected school boards simply doesn’t work. (They do not ask whether NCLB, with all its flaws, when superimposed on a system of local democratic control is superior to local democratic control on its own, which I suspect it might be, but their aim is to influence future policy). The book ought to have a lot of influence over the debates around the re-authorisation, revision, or tacit abandonment of NCLB which, presumably, we’ll start to have at some point.
I hesitate to say too much about it, for fear of releasing you from the obligation of reading it. But the basic argument is as follows.