I’m just back from a trip to the US, which I greatly enjoyed. The main reason for going was the annual conference of the “American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies”:http://asecs.press.jhu.edu/annualmeetingindex.html at Boston, where I’d organised a panel which included blogger Chris Brooke of the “Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html . I also caught an excellent seminar on Rousseau at Columbia given by Fred Neuhouser of Barnard and met up with the “Patrick”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/ and “Teresa”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight Nielsen Hayden for a rather good sushi lunch one day (thanks!). Patrick and Teresa encouraged me enormously when I first started blogging so it was good to meet them in the flesh. More reflections on matters arising as and when, but meanwhile, thanks to everyone who helped to make it a memorable visit.
From the category archives:
Et Cetera
I’m saddened by the news that Alistair Cooke has decided that the ‘Letter from America’ he read on the 20th of February would be the last one. If Cooke had decided that, at ninety-five, he simply didn’t want the hassle of the damn thing anymore, that would be one thing, but it seems that the decision to stop was prompted by the outrageous medical advice that it’s usual and desirable for ninety-five year-olds to slow down a bit. Fair enough, but I was rooting for Cooke to be making me smile when he’d made his century.
It seems to be “trivia”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001435.html “day”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001432.html here at CT, so I will chip in with a question that came to me when watching a report about the Australian Olympic trials. Australian athletes and sports teams compete in green and gold, even though neither of those colors is in their “national flag”:http://www.anbg.gov.au/oz/flag.html.[1] New Zealand does this as well — see, e.g., the “All Blacks”:http://www.nzrugby.co.nz/.
Now, when I started this post I was developing a clever theory to explain this that relied heavily on the fact that Australia and New Zealand are both post-colonial nations located in the Southern Hemisphere. But two European examples just occurred to me: the Italians compete in blue and the Dutch in Orange. Maybe I should just stick to my original question of where Australia got the green and gold scheme from. Are there any other examples of countries whose home sports kit doesn’t share anything with their national flag?
fn1. Here we pause to congratulate Australia on including two of the sillier animals known to man in their “Coat of Arms”:http://www.itsanhonour.gov.au/images/ccoa_lge.jpg. Having gone that far, couldn’t they have found room for a platypus in there somewhere? Down the bottom, maybe?
There wasn’t much light pollution when I was growing up in Ireland, but it was cloudy way too often. It wasn’t until I moved to Arizona and got out into the desert at night that I fully appreciated the Milky Way as a celestial object you could look up and see. I remain appallingly “ignorant”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/07/the_joy_of_lear.html about the constellations, but via “Escadabelle”:http://escadabelle.blogspot.com/ comes a superb “photograph”:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040223.html of the Arizona night sky (see also a “larger version”:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0402/skymt_payne_big.jpg).[1] If you’re ever in Tucson, make time to get out to the “Kitt Peak National Observatory”:http://www.noao.edu/kpno/ which runs a terrific “Nightly Observing Program”:http://www.noao.edu/outreach/nop/. Here in Australia the night sky is also very clear, outside the cities, but I am even more clueless about its composition.
fn1. Incidentally, I know that this photo wasn’t taken just by strolling out into the desert and pointing a camera in the air. But it conveys the feeling of what it’s like to be out there.
In the middle of yet another scandal about American college sports, the NYT chooses to run an editorial calling for cheerleading to be recognised as a competitive sport (It is implied, though not clearly stated, that this sport would be open only to women).
I prefer watching cheerleading to watching American football and I have no problem with claims about its athleticism and so on. And I’ll concede Allen’s arguments that injuries might be reduced if the activity were run on a more professional basis (of course she doesn’t use the dreaded word ‘professional’, anathema to the NCAA).
Nevertheless, this seems to me to be a case where unsound premises have been pushed to their logical conclusions, with predictably bizarre results. The basic problem is the mixture of higher education and professional sport, which makes about us much sense as if high school cafeterias doubled as French restaurants.
Isn’t there even one university president prepared to take up the banner of Robert Maynard Hutchins and get universities out of the entertainment industry?
Begging to differ (politely) from a “comment “:http://pedantry.fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000358.html that Scott Marten makes on the French headscarf ban:
bq. I just don’t understand how people who feel this law is justified because girls are being forced to wear headscarves can think that the solution is to force them to take it back off. If I hold a gun to your head and make you do something you don’t want to, is the correct police response to hold another gun to your head and tell you not to? What makes otherwise rational people think that the solution lies in that direction?
Well, perhaps because there are situations in which holding a gun to someone’s head _is_ the right thing to do, and is indeed in the interests of the person at gunpoint. I don’t think that the headscarf ban is one of those situations, but …
Eugene Volokh “notices an error”:http://volokh.com/2004_02_08_volokh_archive.html#107637664194722535 in a transcript. My friend “Bethany”:http://www.people.virginia.edu/~bb3v/ had a bunch of interviews transcribed professionally for her dissertation and now offers “Transcription Bloopers: 29 Reasons Not to Waste Your Money.”:http://www.people.virginia.edu/~bb3v/bloopers.html Choice examples include:
table(fig). {font-weight:bold;center}_|As Spoken|As Transcribed|
|(. 20th century |((. Planting some tree |
|(. Class oppression |((. Fast depression |
|(. Enrich each other |((. Rate each other |
|(. Serbian oral epic |((. Servient oral ethic |
Errors of this sort in transcripts are at the intersection of “Mondegreens”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen and the strange phenomenon of the media always happening to desperately misreport stories you know something about personally.
A cautionary tale – over the last couple of years, my wife and I have been using cheap prefix companies in Canada and the US to make long distance and international phonecalls. In the US we’ve been using 101-6868, a fairly popular – and cheap – service, which bills indirectly (you see the charge on your monthly phone bill from your carrier). No more. My wife changed phone carrier a few months ago, which apparently meant that “PT-1 Long Distance”:http://www.pt-1.com/, the proprietor of 101-6868 wasn’t able to charge us properly (I presume they didn’t have a relationship with our new carrier). PT-1’s reaction wasn’t to phone us, or to send us a bill – it was to refer the matter (involving the princely sum of $8.93) directly to a debt collection agency, which then sent my wife a dunning letter threatening the usual kinds of nastiness. A couple of very irate phonecalls seem to have sorted the problem out – but other users of the service (or its competitors) may want to take this under advisement. All the more so, as we’re apparently “not the only people”:http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~tien/consumer/pt1-others.html who’ve had this experience with PT-1 Long Distance; indeed, it appears that we’ve gotten off quite lightly in comparison.
There’s a wide spread of political opinions at Crooked Timber; as you can tell, we run the gamut from social democrat to democratic socialist. All sorts, I tell you. But I think that there’s one issue which divides us neatly into two groups. Or rather, into one group consisting of me, and one group consisting of all the others. And that’s the fact that I’m a nationalist. Horrible to admit it but it’s true. I genuinely do believe that, according to my standards (and who else’s standards might I use?), Britain is the best place to live that there is, and the British are the finest people in the world. After that, Irish, Turks, Czechs, Danes and French in that order, and after that there’s quite a steep drop-off. Sorry, where was I? Anyway, yes, the British are best.
If I were to criticise my fellow countrymen at all, however, it would be to say that we do have something of a tendency to panic when we see two flakes of frost sticking together. Look at this bloody circus. It snowed for precisely one hour yesterday evening round our way, a snowfall that had been forecast a week in advance, and left about half an inch of light white dust on the ground, which promptly started to melt. I was four hours late getting into work this morning because the trains couldn’t cope with it. The bloody Russians run trains across Siberia, for Christ’s sake. I actually watched an interview with some London Transport bod on the TV explaining that the Metropolitan line had to be shut down because of “severe weather”, in which it was possible to see over his shoulder a beautiful clear blue cloudless sky. As Peter Cook remarked, the arrival of winter, while usually quite generally expected, seems to always catch London Transport by surprise.
A look back at the history of the Crimean campaign reveals that this has been a bit of a blind spot for the Sons of Albion for quite a while.
UPDATE] I’ve just been told that we’re running “emergency trains” this evening, 24 hours after the event and with the snow entirely melted. Apparently the “severe icy weather conditions” have had serious effects on “both trains and infrastructure”. Apparently water freezes. Who’d a thunk it?
In my experience there is a close to 100 per cent correlation between the stated belief that society is suffering from a decline in “civility” and a willingness to proclaim that we are all being oppressed by “political correctness”. Australian PM John Howard neatly illustrates this. A week or two ago, he was denouncing public schools as hotbeds of political correctness, and the excessive concern with offending religious minorities that (allegedly) led to the curtailment of Christmas celebrations. Now he’s calling for more civility.
The common analysis underlying both demands for “political correctness” (this actual phrase was never used, except jocularly as far as I know, until critics seized on it, but terms such as “sensitivity” or “inclusive language” cover much the same ground) and for “civility”, is that offensive words give rise to offensive acts. In both cases, there’s some ambiguity over whether the problem is with the offence to the recipient or with the reinforcement of the hostile/prejudiced attitudes of the speaker, but the central claim is that modes of speech are an appropriate subject of concern and that some form of government action to encourage more socially appropriate modes of speech, ranging from subtle pressure to direct coercion, is desirable. The only difference between the two positions is that they have different lists of inappropriate words.
I don’t have a sharply defined position on any of this, except that I find people who think that being “politically incorrect” is exceptionally brave and witty to be among the most tiresome of bores. I doubt that changes in speech will, of themselves, produce changes in attitudes. The obvious evidence for this is the rate at which euphemisms wear out and become as offensive as the terms they replaced (for example, ‘handicapped’ for ‘crippled’). On the other hand, I think there’s a lot to be said for avoiding offensive words and forms of speech and can see a place for (tightly drafted and cautiously applied) laws prohibiting or penalising various forms of collective defamation.
[Posted with ecto]
Ted asks:
bq. O’Reilly has repeatedly lied about the interview in which he told Jeremy Glick to “shut up” and cut off his microphone. As it turns out, transcripts can be checked on this intergummy thing. Someone should make up a phrase about that.
I propose that Bill is here speaking a dialect we shall call reverse transcriptese.
It appears that Vice President Cheney and Justice Scalia have been out “shooting”:http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LA_PEOPLE_CHENEY_MOR?SITE=LALAF&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT things. So much for being kind to your web-footed friends.
This New York Times Report about a fight in a firehouse defines a new irregular verb in its first three sentences. The conjugation appears to be “I tease playfully; You make abusive taunts; He is asking for a broken nose.” (Via En Banc.)
Martian probe breaks up in Earth’s atmosphere. British aerospace engineers express sympathy with counterparts on Red Planet.