A local DJ played ‘The Year of the Cat’ a few weeks ago and said that it was about ‘some British comedian called Tony Hancock‘ (yeah, like, the greatest single-handed comedian of the 20th Century, but I’ll let that pass). So, I listened to the song over and over again. And then again. I know the story of Hancock’s life better than anyone my age should, and though the song does sound a little sad, I simply can’t get the reference. (Is ‘a country where they turned back time’ Australia? If so why?) Google doesn’t help much: I got this German site, and an error message. Now I hear Steve Harley’s show and he (who ought to know) associates the song with Yussuf Islam which makes much more sense. Does anyone know the story about this?
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Harry
Norris McWhirter, the man responsible for the Guinness Book of Records, and, arguably, the British public obsession with meaningless facts has just died. Read the obituary, which has entirely admirable people saying very nice things about him. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead so I won’t.
I wonder if anyone can help me. I’m doing some research on Channel One. For those who don’t know Channel One it is a daily newscast for schoolchildren, which is watched in schools. The content is provided to the schools for nothing, and the contracting schools also get a significant amount of televisual equipment for their own use while the contract is in effect. The catch: it broadcasts a 12 minute show, 2 inutes of which are advertisments. Delightful. (Max Sawicky at MaxSpeak
has a nice cost-benefit analysis here). I am interested in it as an example of schools collaborating with corporations in a way that affects the ethos of the school, infusing it with the ethos of the commercial public culture outside the school. But a very minor point that I want to make in the paper is a conjecture that when corporations provide goodies to schools there will be a corresponding drop in the willingness of taxpayers to provide funds. I’m guessing that this happens, eg, when local taxpayers know that a local lottery will provide income to the city or state, and that a substitution effect occurs. My suspicions are increased whenever I describe Channel One to someone and ask them to guess the value of the equipment provided: they MASSIVELY overestimate the value, presumably because they think that any sane person would need to get a hell of a lot of money before they would be willing to force kids to watch commercials. (I’ll put the figure Sawicky and Molnar give below the fold, but even they are pretty certainly overestimating considerably (as they admit)). Rather than conjecture, though, it would be nice to have some empirical evidence of the effect, eg, with respect to a lottery. Does anyone know the literature (or whether there is any) on this?
Bootsie Barker Bites is close to the perfect childrens’ story book. It has action, conflict, sparse narration, believable characters, and a satisfying resolution. The pictures, admittedly, are outstanding, but not better than the text. I read it with a posh English accent for the mothers, and a drab south London drawl for the kids, but my wife reads it with American accents all round, and it works as well both ways.
Bootsie Barker, Ballerina, by contrast, is close to unreadable. Forgettable story-line, dragging prose, no characterisation. It doesn’t matter how you read it — its better not to.
I’m very hard put to think of another case where outstanding writing is followed up so disappointingly. Candidates?
Invisible Adjunct generated a long discussion by asking why Americans don’t have vinegar with their fries. (They do, in fact, in the Northwest). My favourite hypothesis is this:
bq. Almost all the vinegar in the US has been supplanted by factory-made industrial acetic acid solution crap (“white vinegar”). Even the mass-market “apple cider vinegar” is factory-made crap made by mixing the white stuff with apple juice. As a result, most US residents will simply have no idea what vinegar really is. They have to go to a real pub (rare), or some other extraordinary place like Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor ( http://www.zingermans.com ), to get real vinegar these days. Therefore anybody who tries it with the vinegar one can buy will deeply regret it.
This is analagous with my combined hypotheses about why Americans don’t like fruitcake and Brits don’t like Bagels. American fruitcake is a terrifying concoction of food colouring and formaldehyde, that no-one in their right minds would want to have in the house, whereas British fruitcake is a rich and exotic mingling of booze, dried fruits, sugar and fat. Its just a different item. Similarly bagels — bagels in the UK are normally dried out old pieces of cardboard, as opposed to the wonderful moist morsels one can easily find here in the US (and my east coast friends tell me I’ve never even had real bagels.
Great post by Laura about The Mommy Myth. The book is apparently about the sense of guilt mothers have about not spending 24/7 with their children. Laura says this:
bq. What is the source of this more demanding style of parenting? The authors blame a vast right wing conspiracy, which they intelligently call the Committee for Retrograde Antifeminist Propaganda or CRAP. (Call me an academic snob, but I was really irritated by this. Also, trying to be cute, they call the former Soviet Union, those pesky Russkies. Finger nails on a blackboard.)
For the first time in ages I am not teaching a course in which I’m going to use this game, but this morning I got a plaintive email from a former grad student saying that she had lost her copy, and wanted to use it in a class she is teaching. So I thought I’d post it just so that it is available to anyone who hasn’t already made it up themselves. The game is heavily adapted from a series of experiments done by Frohlich and Oppenheimer, and I’ve refined it over the years. It always seems to work well, even with lower-division students in low-discussion classes. I tend to use it prior to asking them to read any Rawls, and spend about 10-15 minutes at the beginning of the game explaining each of the principles and insisting that I really mean it that they can make up their own principles. I assume lots of people have done something like this, so if your version has features you think I should incorporate please let me know.
(Note, as you can see I do not distinguish the two aspects of the second principle — when I have done that it has confused the students and made the game work less well — this way, in fact, they frequently distinguish the issues themselves in the class-wide discussion we have after the small groups have worked it through).
Oliver Kamm has a fun post (and ensuing discussion) giving his nominations for the worst UK ministers since the WWII. Some of his nominations are obvious — Michael Foot for worst leader of the opposition (not, of course, a ministerial post, but you get the idea), Anthony Eden as worst prime Minister (though Churchill is overrated, and why have Major rather than Callaghan as runner up?). Others seem to get the nod simply because bad things happened on their watch, which it is not really reasonable to blame them for — like Nick Brown for Agriculture, and Byers for Transport. They handled their crises badly, to be sure, but is it fair to condemn them rather than the numerous lightweights who never had a crisis to handle? Other still mystify me perhaps because of my ignorance — why is Douglas Hurd the worst FS? One of the commentators rightly takes Kamm to task for leaving George Brown off the list — maybe he just deserves a special award of his own. Finally there are nominees who are simply political: Shirley Williams, I presume, is blamed for comprehensivisation despite the fact that it was set in process by her predecessors Tony Crosland and Margaret Thatcher (yes, that’s right, that Margaret Thatcher). I believe (though somebody could correct me) that more LEAs went comprensive under the preceeding Heath government than during Williams’s time at the DES, and the evidence against comprehensive schooling is mostly hype. Why not John Patten, a truly awful education secretary, and surely at least more deserving of runner up than Kenneth Baker? (not that I have any agenda against him…).
This Morning Edition editorial by Ruben Navarette is infuriating. I was ready to be charmed — he says that John Kerry and the Democrats should shut up about George Bush’s failure to be a war hero in the Vietnam War. These were, he says, decisions made by young men thirty years ago, and are not properly thought about as character issues. I agree — the Vietnam War was an unjust war, unjustly carried out, and I have no animus to my elders who tried to avoid fighting in it. People make odd decisions in the youth, and these do not have to be brought up against them later in life. George Bush’s successful avoidance of any kind risk to self in the service of his country when his country was entirely in the wrong is irrelevant to my evaluation of him.
But then: the little sh** has the audacity to compare Generation X’s experience of the War on Terror with our grandparents’ experience of the Second World War. Why? Because both our generations, unlike the boomer generation between, have experienced the tragedy of American lives being lost on American soil.
David Lester has come under fire in a number of places for, among other things, not attending faculty meetings. But judging from the tenor of the piece he is doing his colleagues a favour by not attending. Don’t we all have colleagues to whom we are grateful when they refrain from doing committee work, attending meetings, etc? Lester sounds as if he is, very generously, sparing his colleagues torment.
My friend Rob Reich has just told me the very sad news that Susan Moller Okin died last week. Her book, Justice Gender and the Family, had a major effect on political theory, and helped produce the turn to the intimate that has happened in the last decade or so: an agenda setting achievement. I have been meaning for some time to blog about one of her arguments, but today is obviously not the day for that. I met her only once myself, but was impressed on that meeting by how the quality of the work I have admired for so long was matched by the quality of the personality I met — something one does not always find. An obituary will appear in tomorrow’s edition of the Stanford Report. (UPDATE: the full Stanford Report obituary is now online here.) Here is the press release:
Susan Moller Okin died of unknown causes last week at the age of 57. Okin was Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and professor of Political Science at Stanford University. At the time of her death she was on leave with a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The late great Jake Thackray has a song, Old Molly Metcalf, in which he describes a local quirky way of counting sheep in Swaledale (Yorkshire). The shepherds apparently count(ed) as follows:
bq. Yan, Chan, Tether, Mether, Pip, Azar, Sazar, Akka, Cotta, Dik
Yanadik, Channadik, Thetheradik, Metheradik, Bumfit, Yanabum, Chanabum, Thetherabum, Metherabum, Jiggit.
I first heard the song long ago, and at that time still remembered a colloquial counting system from my Welsh childhood, but I have now completely forgotten it (it wasn’t Welsh — it wasn’t one of those parts of Wales). There must be others. Does anyone know what I’m thinking of? And can anyone give the origins of the Yan, Chan, Tether, Mether, Pip system? (Google gives me one hit — the page with the lyrics of Old Molly Metcalf).
I hate to admit it, but Ed Felser may have a point about something, at least. In attacking the teaching practices in Philosophy departments he says:
bq. If, for example, a course in political philosophy is offered in which the readings comprise selections from the likes of the liberal philosopher John Rawls, the libertarian Robert Nozick, and various feminist and left-of-center communitarian critics of Rawls, with no conservative writers assigned at all and with Nozick treated as an easily-refuted eccentric whose views are not shared by any other contemporary philosopher worth reading, then students will — obviously — get the impression that the left-of-center views are the only realistic options. And this sort of thing is, I submit, extremely common in the contemporary university.
I observed this pretty much as soon as I taught my first upper-division political philosophy course. You start with Rawls, because you feel obliged to treat them to a proper, fully articulated, theory of justice, and also to give them a reasonably good sense of the field. You move onto Nozick, who is very clever but full of incomplete arguments, and intuitions that he passes off as arguments, along with apparently willful misreadings of his colleague. You use Dworkin, maybe Raz, and some commentators on Rawls, including perhaps Jerry Cohen. You might introduce some feminist work (easier to do now than 13 years ago). And you complete it with Sandel and a bit of MacIntyre (or MacIntyre and a bit of Sandel), which involves many of the same misreadings of Rawls.
Now, a course like that succeeds in the two main missions I feel obliged to carry out: giving a true sense of the nature of the field, and structuring the students’ learning so that they learn how to reason sharply and do political philosophy analytically.
I drafted the following post yesterday, when it had a more anti-Nader feel to it. But two people subsequently approached me about my thoughts about Nader, and told me they supported him standing, giving pretty good reasons, so I have modified my thoughts in the light of that (an indication, perhaps, of how fluid my views are right now). However, one of them said she would have to be a closet Nader supporter, because she didn’t want to deal with the unreasoned anger she felt that open support would make her vulnerable to in her workplace, which, I think, supports my main point.
bq. UPDATE interesting stuff here from unrepentant 2000 Nader supporters Chun the Unavoidable and Russell Arben Fox. See also Chuck at the Chutry Experiment. And a fun rant from Timothy Burke