Lately

What Samuel Johnson writes when Samuel Johnson Finds he Cannot Speak

2011-08-20T00:00:00+01:00

Here’s Samuel Johnson at age 73, upon waking in the night and discovering that he couldn’t speak (he’d had a stroke):

Dear Sir, It hath pleased almighty God this morning to deprive me of the powers of speech; and, as I do not know that it may be his farther good pleasure to deprive me soon of my senses, I request you will, on the receipt of this note, come to me, and act for me, as the exigencies of my case may require. (From Oliver Sacks, The Mind’s Eye.)

(c.f. oh I don’t know, the entirety of Twitter.)

Junior Hockey in Canada's Heartland

2011-06-07T00:00:00+01:00

One of my favourite ever “long reads” is a piece by Guy Lawson in the January 1998 Harper’s: “Hockey nights: The tough skate through junior-league life.”

It’s an account of ice-hockey as played in the rural Canadian town of Flin Flon, Manitoba by an under-20 team called the Bombers. Hockey there is pretty tough. (This might not be a surprise.) There’s a fairly casual attitude toward on-rink punch-ups, but violence is also deployed surprisingly dispassionately in other situations, like evaluating potential recruits.

Here’s a sampling:

“Meeks isn’t the right guy. He’s too good a fighter,” Razor said to me. “We’ll send someone else, and if the kid [Sides, a prospective recruit] answers the bell and stands up for himself, he’ll be accepted by the team. If he doesn’t, we’ll go from there.” Sides scored three goals that session. The next afternoon he fought Ferlie, a man-child six inches shorter than Sides but an absurdly eager and able fighter. Skate-to-skate, lefts and rights were thrown in flurries. Sides’s head bounced off the Plexiglas as he and Ferlie wrestled each other to the ice. The players on the benches stood and slapped their sticks against the boards in applause. Sides and Ferlie checked their lips for blood, shook hands, exchanged a grin.

Now Razor addressed the topic of fighting. Because of the SJHL’s penalty of compulsory ejection from the rest of the game for fighting, Razor said, other teams would send mediocre players out to try and goad Flin Flon’s best players into scraps. “I know things are going to happen out on the ice. It’s the nature of the game,” Razor said as he paced the room. “But Rodge, Lester, Schultzie, the goal scorers, you can’t fight unless you take an equally talented player with you. If we lose one of our best, we need them to lose one of their best.” “You told Ferlie to fight against Dauphin,” Rodge said. “No,” Razor explained, “I didn’t tell Ferlie to fight. We were getting beaten and I said, ‘If you want to start something, now would be a good time.’” The Bombers all laughed.

A few of the Bombers had told me about the present that Meeks’s older brother—a giant of a man and an ex-Bomber, with 30 points and 390 penalty minutes in one season—had given Meeks for his eighteenth birthday: a beating. “Yeah, he did, Scoop,” Meeks said sheepishly. “My brother would say, ‘I can’t wait until you turn eighteen, because I’m going to lay a licking on you.’ The day of my birthday he saw me and started coming after me. I grabbed a hockey stick and started swinging, nailing him in the back, just cracking him. It didn’t even faze him. Next thing you know, my jersey’s over my head and he’s beating the crap out of me. My mom and one of my brother’s friends hopped in and broke her up.” “Why did your brother do that?” I asked. Meeks shrugged. “I turned eighteen.”

“I hate rye,” Holly announced. “I get into fights when I drink rye.” She told me about the Boxing Day social last year. “This girl pissed me off, so me and a friend tag-teamed her. My friend slapped her and I threw my drink on her and she started blabbing at me so I grabbed her and kicked her in the head and ripped all her hair out. She was bald when I was done.” The girl had to go to the hospital to have her broken nose set, Holly said, now speaking in quiet tones because she had noticed the girl’s aunt a few tables down from us. “And then she went to the cop shop and filed charges, even though she was four years older than me.”

Meeks had explained his fighting technique to me back in Flin Flon: “I can’t punch the other guy first,” he said. “That’s why I’ve got a lot of stitches. The other guy always gets the first punch and then I get mad.” Meeks took the first punch from Seventeen square in the jaw. Meeks’s head jerked back. He grabbed Seventeen by the collar and threw a long, looping, overhand right. He pulled Seventeen’s jersey over his head. Another shot, a right jab, an uppercut; switched hands, a combination of lefts. A strange sound came from the audience, a mounting, feverish cry: Seventeen was crumpling, arms flailing, as the linesmen stepped in and separated the two. Meeks waved to his teammates as he was led off the ice by the officials to the screams of the Weyburn fans. The Bombers scored four minutes later. Between periods in the dressing room Razor shook Meeks’s hand. “Great job.”

Meeks couldn’t play and wasn’t sure when he would be able to play again. “I called Meghan and told her I broke my hand,” he said. “She said, ‘You did not.’ I said I did, I had to fight. She said I shouldn’t fight. She said that I always have a choice.”

Oscar Wilde, living up to his China

2011-05-16T00:00:00+01:00

I went to see The Cult of Beauty – The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 at the V&A on the weekend, and very enjoyable it was too. The idea of the Aesthetic Movement seems to be that art need not have a purpose—whether it be didactic or moral or social—it need only be beautiful. And so its practitioners went about painting beautiful pictures, making beautiful furniture, and wearing beautiful clothes. As you might expect, a Victorian movement that not only lacked intellectual depth, but asserted it unnecessary, attracted a good deal of satire and parody.

Indeed, one suggestion for the cause of the movement’s decline was that “satire and parody overwhelmed the movement”—a possibility that is damning even in its “could be true” form. Gilbert and Sullivan went to the trouble of writing an entire comic opera in this spirit (Patience), but I particularly like the efforts of Punch. The cartoon below, “The Six-Mark Tea-Pot” is George du Maurier’s response to Oscar Wilde’s remark to visitors that he finds it “harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.”

The Six-Mark Tea-Pot

Aesthetic Bridegroom. “It is quite consummate, is it not?”

Intense Bride. “It is indeed! Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it!”

(source)

Orwell and Emerson--Aesthetes Both

2011-05-07T00:00:00+01:00

Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Orwell (both writers who you’d think might be tolerant of a little bit of eccentricity in others), turn out to be very strongly against poor hygience and sorry manners.

Emerson, from his essay “Manners”:

I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic.

Orwell, from “The Road to Wigan Pier”:

You can have an affection for a murderer or a sodomite, but you cannot have an affection for a man whose breath stinks—habitually stinks, I mean. However well you may wish him, however much you may admire his mind and character, if his bream stinks he is horrible and in your heart of hearts you will hate him.

Also, Orwell turns out to be a bit more, well, human that I took him to be: whilst he certainly has a great deal of sympathy toward the working class (to say the least), he’s somewhat snobbish toward them. (He is aware of this propensity, but doesn’t appear to feel very guilty about it.)

All my notions—notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful—are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy.

And he’s also a little bit racist, in an “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” kind of way:

A shabby-genteel family is in much the same position as a family of ‘poor whites’ living in a street where everyone else is a Negro. In such circumstances you have got to cling to your gentility because it is the only thing you have; and meanwhile you are hated for your stuckup-ness and for the accent and manners which stamp you as one of the boss class.

On Doing Things Incorrectly

2011-05-07T00:00:00+01:00

A little list of the things I’ve done incorrectly for a very long time, or things I’ve overlooked for ages:

For a very long time, I thought the yellow and grey tabs and the end of a Swiss Army knife were part of the design—I didn’t realise that these were the ends of the tooth pick and tweezers.
I didn’t realise that nail scissors were supposed to be used with the curve opposing the curve of the fingernail, instead of following it.
When using an eye dropper, it’s much more pleasant if you look away when actually doing the dropping!

Does everyone have realisations like this? I guess they mostly concern things that are done privately—since you so very rarely see other people do them, you don’t realise that everyone else’s way is superior to yours.

How the UK will produce and consume energy in 2050

2011-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

The UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change has a very nice interactive web application that can be used to investigate the impact of various choices regarding energy production and use (for example, an emphasis on solar power, or the electrification of all transport, or better insulation for all homes) upon greenhouse gas emissions and the amount of land required to be devoted to different modes of energy production in the UK of 2050.

The app is necessarily sophisticated, and therefore somewhat difficult to use, but I recommend persevering—the results are fascinating. It’s both surprising and disturbing to discover how much land needs to be devoted to energy production and/or carbon capture to meet greenhouse gas emission targets. (The number of turbines required for the most ambitious level of onshore wind generation works out to be the equivalent of a turbine every 600 metres alongside every motorway, dual carriageway, and trunk road in Britain.)

To get a feel for how the app works, I suggest starting with the “Example pathways” dropdown menu in the top right. From here you can choose from a list of presets—more nuclear, more offshore wind, etc.—as well as the strategies of a few prominent individuals and groups. (The image at the top of this post shows the land required to be devoted to different energy-production modes under the Friends of the Earth’s scheme.)

It would’ve been nice if the costs of different schemes were considered, but I suppose this is fairly hard to estimate. Still, cost does make a difference. (Also not considered: whether nuclear energy and geosequestration are safe.)

Caravaggio and the Artichokes

2011-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

Amazingly, police records describing Caravagio’s numerous scrapes with the law have survived until today, and are currently part of an exhibition at Italy’s State Archive. Some of the details are summarised in a splendid piece on BBC News, including this wonderful police statement of a waiter who claimed to have been attacked by Caravaggio in a disagreement over artichokes:

About 17 o'clock [lunchtime] the accused, together with two other people, was eating in the Moor’s restaurant at La Maddalena, where I work as a waiter. I brought them eight cooked artichokes, four cooked in butter and four fried in oil. The accused asked me which were cooked in butter and which fried in oil, and I told him to smell them, which would easily enable him to tell the difference.

He got angry and without saying anything more, grabbed an earthenware dish and hit me on the cheek at the level of my moustache, injuring me slightly… and then he got up and grabbed his friend’s sword which was lying on the table, intending perhaps to strike me with it, but I got up and came here to the police station to make a formal complaint…

How I Managed to Read the Third Stieg Larsson Before the Second; Kindle Review

2010-10-04T00:00:00+01:00

Several people have expressed surprise that I managed to read the third Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy--The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest before reading the second. The reason I bought it out of sequence was partly the fault of my Kindle, but the reason I finished it (arguably the greater error) was because I thought the author was being commendably efficient with story.

Yes, I did think plot points were being skipped over and dealt with summarily but hey, I thought that was intentional. I am reminded of Chekhov's advice: "Fledgling authors frequently should do the following; bend the notebook in half and tear off the first half ... you'll only have to change the beginning of the second half a little bit and the story will be utterly comprehensible. Everything that has no direct relation to the story must be ruthlessly thrown out." (Cited in the introduction to "A Doctor's Visit: Short Stories by Anton Chekhov," by Tobias Wolff.) It seems there's even a term for this: "in medias res."

Anyway, the Kindle. I really like it. It's good for books and longer articles. It does come with a web browser, but it's slow and awkward and really only useful in emergencies. (I haven't tested it, but the free web access is supposed to work internationally.)

The battery life is pretty good, although I do find myself charging it every few days. The built-in dictionary is useful, as is the keyboard. (For searching, for the web browser, for taking notes.) For some reason it's fairly difficult to navigate from book to book, and within books. (There isn't always a table of contents, and it's awkward to use even when it does exist.) The UI is otherwise fairly well thought-out.

You more or less do need a case, and unfortunately the Amazon-produced ones are really expensive, especially the ones with the integrated LED, which go for £50! Luckily I discovered that my old SunDog book cover fits the Kindle perfectly. (It also doesn't look quite a bad in real life as it does on that webpage.)

There's quite a few good way to get content onto the Kindle, though nothing as yet is completely painless. First of all, you can send any PDF to a special Amazon address associated with your Kindle and Amazon will arrange for it to automatically end up on your device. If your device has a WiFi connection, it's copied to your Kindle for free. (If it doesn't have a WiFi connection at that exact moment, delivery is queued.) Even better, if you use the subject like "convert", Amazon will convert it from PDF into Kindle format, so that text can be resized, notes work, and so on. This usually works fine with PDFs that are fairly "clean" such as the print versions of web pages. (More info.) Note that if you're on a Mac, every print dialog has a "Save as PDF..." and "Mail PDF" option.

The other tool I use is Instapaper, which is a site and associated tools (bookmarklets, apps) that make it easy to bookmark and track "long" articles that you might want to read later, or on a different device. Its trick is that it presents a stripped-down view of the article, without advertisements or distracting graphics--very useful when reading on the screen, but even better if you want to create a plain PDF to send to Amazon for conversion. Instapaper also has some more direct Kindle integration, but I don't like the way it combines articles together in one bundle.

$100,000 electric cars? They're not environmentally friendly

2010-08-22T00:00:00+01:00

There's pretty much no way a $100,000 car can be more environmentally friendly than a $20,000 car. This is true irrespective of the way in which the cars are powered. If you buy a $100,000 car, you put $100,000 into the economy. That is, $100,000 becomes available to the manufacturer's suppliers and employees to buy stuff, and there's no reason that this money will be spent in a more environmentally friendly way than any other $100,000 that goes into the economy.

I think the only way to make the purchase of a $100,000 car environmentally friendly is to buy a $20,000 car, and burn $80,000. At least that way you get rid of $80,000 that would otherwise be used to consume stuff.

(If an electric car ends up being cheaper over its lifetime (i.e. including fuel/power) then it will be more environmentally friendly than its gas-powered equivalent. But I don't think this would ever apply to the Tesla Roadster.)

Askers versus guessers

2010-06-27T00:00:00+01:00

The Guardian on the two philosophies toward making requests of others (for a few nights' accommodation with a friend, for a raise, etc.), and what happens when an "Asker" meets a "Guesser":

We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything—a favour, a pay rise—fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid "putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept."

Neither's "wrong", but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won't think it's rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who's assuming you might decline. If you're a Guesser, you'll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum, not a dichotomy, and it explains cross-cultural awkwardnesses, too: Brits and Americans get discombobulated doing business in Japan, because it's a Guess culture, yet experience Russians as rude, because they're diehard Askers.

The quotes, and the idea for the dichotomy itself, come from an ask.metafilter.com answer, which is well worth reading in full. (And the original question too, for context.)