Old Interesting Things

27 July 2007
Well it's going to have to be this isn't it. For God's sake, ducks, seabirds, whatever, I ask you............

12th June 2007
Sometimes shepards use a numerical system in base eight (Ah yes, ie 1 sheep, 2 sheep, .........7, sheep, one8 sheep, eleven sheep, twelve sheep........seventeen sheep, two8sheep, 21 sheep, etc)to count their flocks, a bit of desultory Googling™ has failed to indicate why. An article in Wiki suggests that the origin of a base eight system may have come from people using the spaces between their fingers to count. Even if the last bit does sound like complete tosh this is a quite an interesting article if you’re into a bit of light recreational maths. The codex to this would be here.


1st May 2007
Again apparently, (I've got to start checking out the stuff I hear in pubs) the street where Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu grew up in South Africa is the only street to have produced two Nobel Prize winners.

11th April 2007
Spike is apparently an accepted and common diminutive for Terence. Like Jack for John. Why?

2nd April 2007
Ritalin is the brand name of a drug that is often given to children who have been diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperativity Disorder). It is unknown why a drug that induces heightened activity in adults produces the opposite effect in children. It is recommended to be given to children no younger than six but it is not unusual to find it perscribed for children as young as two. The generic name for this drug is methylphenidate, it is part of that family of drugs known as amphetamines. The street name for these is Speed. Presumably, as a society, we are all going to go to hell.

March 2007
Brian May is not only an extraordinarily talented musician, (I'm sorry but his guitar solos are just the best that have ever been) genuine, all round great person and the owner of fantastic hair, but also nearly finished a PhD in astrophysics and has just co-written a book on the topic. Naturally I found this out from Daithi's blog. Someday I'll have picked this stuff up somewhere else but today is not that day. Update: Some random commenter on said post says he did finish the PhD, I don't know. Might Google it later though.

Lies and the lying liars that tell them

My brain is addled as a result of reading Tristram Shandy (not for pleasure obviously, but because I have to teach it, if they allowed me to teach Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, believe me, I would). The novel in question dissects the whole process of writing so completely that I feel utterly unable to construct a sentence. So, gentle readers, bear with me. But I am not here today to talk about Tristram Shandy, because for one thing I’m thoroughly sick of the damn thing and for another, I don’t think you’d like it much. But it directs me, in a roundabout (and shandian) fashion, to the business of truth telling. I am having problems getting my students to understand the concept of the ‘unreliable narrator,’ which is the idea that character telling the story, is not under any obligation to tell it truthfully. I think that the reason people have such difficulty with this is that as a result of our moral and cultural background, we by and large don’t expect people to lie to us. Had we grown up under some kind of dictatorial regime, or indeed, if we worked for the tax office, our expectations might be a bit different, but most people I know expect to be told the truth. Now, it has been suggested that I have a Machiavellian streak within me, and it occurs to me that this is a situation that can be exploited. I have always considered myself to be a rather good liar. I think that lying to someone is probably a pretty easy thing to do, given that we are so culturally conditioned to expect honesty.

Just at this point, I think it’s very important to make it clear, for the attention of visiting lawyers and those people who I call my friends, that I have never told any large or significant lies, I’ve also never told lies to anyone in authority (police, aforementioned tax office, etc). I just like to think that if the situation arose I would be able to carry it off with aplomb. This is probably another manifestation of the part of me that thinks it would be really cool to be a spy.

So I treated this subject like I do all the important issues of the day, I ran it by my brother. Now, initially he was confused, because usually the important issues of the day involve the X Factor or Big Brother, but gradually he warmed to it. We decided that there were various categories of lies and that understanding the difference between them is crucial. There is the ‘lying to be kind’ sort of lie – ‘wow, that outfit looks amazing on you,’ ‘yes, of course those trousers still fit you’ ‘no I’m sure no-one remembers that time when you got really drunk and called your cousin a self-centred bitch’. This kind of lying proves that in order to be a nice person, you have to learn to play fast and lose with the truth. Totally and complete honesty is not a desirable personality trait. Then there is the ‘getting out of jail free’ lie. A classic childhood lie, used to get oneself out of trouble. In its simplest form, it is epitomised by a classic Homer Simpson line - ‘it was like this when I got here.’ Now I have used this in my time, in the main successfully, but it is the type of thing that one grows out of. I still use it in really minor ways ‘Sorry I didn’t call you back, I ran out of battery’ (though this can easily be mistaken for the truth, because sometimes I do run out of battery). But in the main, it just isn’t a good strategy in the adult world. Lying about your role in a major fuck up in work is a very bad idea. I’ve found that a dramatic, tearful confession, dark hints at hormonal issues, and many promises never to do it again are much more effective. But as a child, I was very good at it. The best approach is to stick to your lie doggedly, no matter what evidence they produce to the contrary. Eventually, they decide that you are not dishonest, but you may be insane. This usually gets them off your case.

One of my favourite kinds of lies is the ‘keeping up with the joneses’ lie. Again, something that one grows out of, but in the past I have indulged in quite a lot. I think I lot of kids do this; certainly one of my mum’s current charges is a serial offender in this respect. ‘Santa brought me three horses’ ‘I went to Disneyworld at the weekend’ ‘I have forty seven cousins’ (No, I don’t understand the cousins thing either, I think that little girls must be competitive about just about everything). These kinds of lies are a direct result of insecurity in the face of an increasingly materialistic world. In order to be considered successful in this gloomy sphere of ours, everything has to be biggest, latest, fastest, most expensive. My brother reminded me how this is played out in secondary school language classes when they ask the question ‘how many rooms are in your house?’ Classes full of children up and down the land immediately begin to count attics, hot-presses, landings, outhouses, larders and the cupboard under the stairs. Young, inexperienced teachers wonder where all these 45 room mansions are to be found. It rears its ugly head again a few weeks later when they are asked ‘where did you go on your holidays last year?’ Obviously Bundoran is not an acceptable answer – so ‘Chile,’ ‘Australia,’ ‘The Andaman Islands.’ My little bro told teachers year after year that we had a house in Spain. He’d never set foot in Spain.

But my absolutely favourite kinds of lies are the motiveless ones. And the beauty of these is that no one questions their truth because, as I said right at the start, people anticipate honesty, and why would you lie for no reason at all? When I was about eight, we were talking about badgers in school and my teacher told us that badger hair could be used to make brushes. And I flung my hand straight up into the air and told her that yes, I knew about that, because we had a badger hair brush at home. As an authenticating detail, I added that it had been given to my parents as a wedding present. With a bit more time, I probably could have come up with some amusing anecdotes too. I have no idea why I did that. My brother related a similar story, one Monday; his (presumably hung over) teacher asked them what they had done at the weekend. My brother thinks over his weekend and decides that it was singularly lacking in incident. He isn’t happy with this, so he spices things up a bit and tells the class that his family won ten pounds on the lottery. I love how mundane this is. Just ten pounds? Why not many thousands? But that’s where the beauty is, why would you lie about such a paltry amount? His teacher asked him what numbers we chose and with the kind of criminal assurance that can only have come from my mother’s side of the family, starts rhyming off his seven times tables, 7, 14, 21. If I had known about it at the time I would have been pretty pissed off with him actually, because this was not the image I wanted to portray of my family. In my book, lying was used to enhance social standing, not to undermine it. Playing the lottery was the kind of thing chavs did. And why would we have needed a lottery win, with our 45 room mansion and our house in Spain?

Hannah said...

27th February, 2007

I think you're so right about the lying and I think you're right that people are culturally conditioned to expect truth, but what I'm really confused about is, why? There is nothing in our experience of the world, neither in microcosm nor macrocosm which should make us think that we are going to be told the truth. Our friends, relations, teachers, politicians, world leaders and of course, librarians, lie to us. And we know they do because we see the evidence of it all the time. I'm thinking of 'we have proof that suggests there are weapons of mass destruction in iraq' as an example of this. More crucially, we lie, in all the ways you outlined, and usually people expect from others what they do themselves. As, I don't know, someone I'm sure, pointed out, the nature of subjectivity is that you can only understand the world through ourselves. So why do we expect truth? The whole idea is that living beings learn from experience; its a key part of the survival instinct, but if we are as empirically challenged as you're suggesting, I think you might be suggesting a whole new lie-based evolutionary theory.

Bluejunilla said...

2 March 2007

You needn't think I missed that one you know.

Some random pyschologist I once read maintained that lies and the belief of them are a central part of everyone's individual pathology. These aught to be in relation to very specific things though, ie whatever it is that a particular psychology has the most trouble dealing with. This does not explain Viola's quite plausible theory that the human default position is belief, when all logic really aught to indicate that the default position shoul d be suspicion. I think it may be lazyness.

Also if you think about it, the sanity of an entire species is protected by our communal belief in the personal lie, 'it couldn't possibly happen to me', this is blatently untrue yet without it, I doubt anyone would ever leave their individual little, despair ridden burrows. We need our lies, all sorts of them, so perhaps we can't afford to be too exacting with the truth.

I've just read that Channel Seven has got the rights to broadcast the football, which is brilliant. For the last couple of years Planet Rupert had the rights. I object to that just on principle. But the best part about this is that all the great commentators at Channel Seven get the chance to call games again. (Rupert Murdoch's Channel Ten let Robert Walls commentate. Robert Walls, for anyone who doesn't follow the footy, was a useless player, a sadistic (and useless) coach and a stupid commentator. He always makes me think of what Martin Johnson said of England's '86-'87 touring side, can't bat, can't bowl, can't field - only in Walls' case I guess this would be, can't play, can't coach, can't call. Walls was the inventor of the concept of the 'one percenters'. I'm not even going to dignify it by explaining it; apart from anything else, it was an impractical thing for a coach to demand of his players because, for an unbelievably high level of pain, exhaustion and injury, you had a one per cent chance of getting a return. You can see why under him, Brisbane went absolutely no where and went on to win three back-to-back premierships as soon as he left.)

Anyway, the change in the broadcast rights means that Denis Commetti and Bruce McAvaney will be commentating again. I'm particularly fond of Commetti's calls because he has such an unexpected sense of humour. But like everyone else, its having McAvaney back calling that is really wonderful. McAvaney has an amazing mind for facts and figures. There is really nothing he doesn't know about sport. Any sport really, but footy in particular. There is nothing he doesn't know about the history and the players and the coaches. In that sense he is more like a griot. And, over the years, this has come to support and strengthen his calls which have developed in a Homeric quality to them. (I love it when the world makes space for someone who is talented in a really odd way, as McAvaney is.)

That the language should have developed in an oral-fomulaic way (like Homer or the Beowulf poet) is not as surprising as it sounds. One of the academic truisms is that Australians make good Anglo-Saxonists and I suspect that that is because of a cultural similarity. Both are diaspora communities, established through violence with a strong masculine honour code. That comparison is even more accurate if it is limited to Anglo-Saxons and the Australian football community. To give an example of this honour code in action, Wayne Carey, one of the all time greats and a match-winner, had an affair with the wife of one of his team mates and it ended his career because no player in the league would play in the same side as him after that. Lots of team managers wanted to sign him and found that if they did they would lose the rest of their team.

But there are linguistic similarities too. Like Old English, Australian English is fond of alliteration; an effective way of onomatopoeically suggesting movement; a chief concern in both cultures. Australian English stretches common use more than any other regional English I'm aware of. It produces a very high level of new slang constantly. It is extremely innovative, or, I suppose if you're inclined to see it that way, incorrect. I take issue with the sense that its not correct though because it always obeys grammatical rules, it just applies them in new ways. In particular, Australian English has a fondness for motion. As much as possible, nouns are turned into verbs. ('Soccer' is a verb in Australia, as in 'to soccer the ball off the ground'.) Treating language that way means that all the information contained in the noun is conveyed plus motion. Conversely, Australian English would much rather use verbs as nouns, again, because it means that motion is added even to an essentially static word like a noun. Wanting to convey action also means that tenses are used in particular ways so that past action is given immediacy. A tense resembling the perfect except that it is continuous, is often used but only for conveying action, not all past events. And yet, for all this innovation, Anglo-Australia hasn't produced much in the way of a body of literature. Traditional forms of literature don't answer the sorts of things Anglo-Australia wants to express. Australian literature has also been hampered by the culture cringe and the self-consciousness of trying to be properly Australian when no one is really sure (except the Americans) what that really is anyway. Australia knows itself through the perceptions of foreigners. The sense that it ought to produce distinctively 'Australian' literature is also one that comes from foreigners. Australian literature is better and truer when it has no sense of itself but instead insists on conveying meaning as in Ned Kelly's famous description of the police officers troubling his family: 'big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splaw-footed sons of Irish Bailiffs or english landlords which is better known as Officers of Justice or Victorian Police'.

The football commentary is one of the best, most expressive, most innovative forms of literature coming out of Australia at the moment. And it is wonderful to have it back in the hands of great commentators. This is a famous victory.

poor daffodil

dear bluejunilla, i just can't have you sat here talking all to yourself, so i'll tell you that today a small boy walked past my window swinging a freshly snipped daffodil in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. as he walked, the bold boy repeatedly smacked the daffodil with the bottle of water. i'm sure there was a tune in his head somewhere but the daffodil was struggling to keep up and i thought of you and the outrage you would have felt at seeing what i saw and then i was glad that, particularly given the week you've had, you didn't:)


Hannah said...
I love your multi-coloured daffodils! ;)
24 February 2007 14:48


Bluejunilla said...
Oh don't worry too much, I spend a great deal of my time talking to myself afterall, this is just a whole new media through which to do it. I concur with the thought that your daffodils are not only wonderfully creative but intensely cheering on a Monday morning :) I would indeed have found the daffodil assault very upsetting, it's not like the world is in a position to be able to absorb the wanton loss of daffodils at the moment. I think that what this, partcularly combined with Viola's incites, should remind us of, is that children are not very nice people and should be watched carefully at all times ;)

The Companionship of Strangers

A rather nice thing happened to me today. I was meeting a friend for lunch and Friend arrived fresh out of a meeting with her supervisor. I was expecting a degree of frustration, but as it turns out she was in fact, rabid. Anyway, she spent a half hour or so expounding at volume and length about the short comings of her supervisor. This isn't the nice thing, it's coming.

Friend discovered she was late and disappeared with some speed, feeling rather buffeted (not at all in a bad way, Friend, just a bemused caught on the hop sort of way) I said 'bye' in a rather small voice to Friend's rapidly retreating back. Now, we were sitting outside and had been sharing a bench with another random person. In the wake of Friend's departure, the girl we were sharing the bench with couldn't stifle a certain degree of sniggering, which she apologised for.

I said not to worry about it since given the volume I don' t think she could have avoided overhearing without technological aid. (It's not like anyone's passing on state secrets anyway.) She goes on to say that it's nice to know other people have supervisor issues aswell. We then passed a very pleasant ten minutes, providing mutual empathy and support about how useless and often hindering supervisors tend to be. As I say, it was nice.

Aaarrggg

I have been periodically sending emails destined for my (possibly mythical) supervisor to the dept secretary with a very politely worded request that she forward them on, in order to make quite sure of avoiding spam filter issues. I only do this occassionally, when I fancy a change.

I recieved an email from her recently saying that it really isn't reasonable of me to expect her to do this and I am to cease. I don't know what I was thinking.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

My daily perusal of the Guardian was a veritable emotional roller-coaster today. Firstly we discover that according to a recent ICM poll Labour (Labour! someone should do them under the trade descriptions act) are in real trouble. The electorate produced a decidedly lukewarm response to Blair and a pretty vicious one to Gordon Brown. Yay! It's the little things that make a difference. National polls are always a bit suss due to the boundaries issue, but still.

However, things did go seriously downhill from there. 28, 000 people (public apathy been what it is, this is not an insignificant number) signed an e-petition against Labour's national ID card plan. And today the illustrious leader of the British people posted a response to said. Reading this response, someone unaware of the context would probably be unable to guess that any form of public dissatisfaction had been expressed. It is, yet again, the same speech that has been wheeled out a number of times explaining how the system is going to turn the UK into Eden. The gist of it is why the people really do want the scheme, they just don't know they do. Remind you of anything? Like the time, our illustrious leader, the Blessed Bertie, on receiving a resounding no from his people on a certain EU treaty, ran straight to Brussels and groveled. His point being that we were misguided, not evil and would definitely do better next time. Bless, they're not bad, only stupid. He then threatened us with another round of the 80's unless we did the next referendum right. Obsequious, little weasel.

Anyway we let him away with it (well I haven't, I'll never forgive him for a number of things, and that one's right up the top of the list) but the British people seem less forgiving and good for them. Although, I suppose Bertie, for all his crapnesses has never actually taken us to war. Now I'm hardly the sort of person to lean toward the Tories but there's relativity at work here. And it really is refreshing to see people deciding that they couldn't care less if Cameron spent the entirety of his college career stoned off his face, as long as his policies stack up.

Then it gets really bad. Blair has decided his ID card scheme will include a national database of finger prints, to which the police will have access. That's right, everyone, regardless of innocence or irrelevance or anything else, just because you never know when having a person's prints on file might prove handy. This is OUTRAGEOUS. It is the most flagrant, gratuitous, despicable, unspeakable breach of civil liberties I have seen in recent times, and it does seem to be the time for it. The right to anonymity was always one the most significant foundations of democracy and with damn good reason. As is the right to be seen as innocent until proven guilty, the right to privacy, the right to civil disobedience. This is way too close to Orwell, and coming on the heels of some remarkably discreet acts in both Britain and US, that eat away at these same liberties, is extremely worrying, and indeed infuriating. This is before one goes into why it's not actually going to provide any of the solutions he's touting it as providing.

It's been said before and I'll say it again : We need not worry about terrorists destroying our way of life, we are managing perfectly well on our own.

Blair under fire over police access to ID card database
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,2017401,00.html

Brown v Cameron
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labourleadership/story/0,,2017042,00.html

Other people's work

In a complete fit of laziness, and in fairness I've other things on my mind, here are my favourites from today.

Pro bono publico - a transcript of the utterly fantastic 'Peter Finch' speech from the first episode of 'Studio 60'. Thank you Daithi.
http://www.lexferenda.com/?p=246

And why would I have a go at McDowell when other people have done it so much better than I ever could? See the Swearing Lady's finely executed hatchet job here. It really is a joy.
http://arseendofireland.blogspot.com/2007/02/dont-worry-be-vague.html

By way of compensation, on a somewhat lighter note. The bbc gardening desktop background for this month is a very lovely Christmas rose, in soothing, even calming, tones of lemon and white-green.

Get it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/today_in_your_garden/calendar_index.shtml

Let the refutations begin!

Right, well here is my response to the events of last night. I have to say, while I deeply appreciate all the lovely, lovely things that have been said about me (and especially about my sense of style since I really don't put that much effort into it ) it is a fairly odd experience finding out exactly how you come across to your friends. Some of it is no surprise - someone once nicknamed me Bubblius Optimus at a toga party we had when I was studying Latin (in a previous incarnation). But some of it is completely new.

I now get the feeling that I should give up this terribly painful essay that I am currently engaged in writing and go and find an unsuspecting clergyman to marry so that I can spend the rest of my life making jams and crafts for the next church fete! That really would be playing to all my strengths in way that trying to make sense of what Niklas Luhmann is actually trying to say really doesn't}:) It may even make me happy!

Love you all and hope the heads aren't too sore! Wish me luck for tonight - he may not be a clergyman but he is an academic so that may be a step in the right direction. Oh dear - there is no way of conveying that I am very, very definately only joking};)

Update 16/2/07
By Bluejunilla
There is nothing that 2 pints of coffee, 4 pints of water and a sausage sandwich won't cure. You'll only knock 'em dead tonight, you don't need any poncy luck :) I had some trouble finding an appropriate quote in Julius Caesar, and I think all I actually achieved was 'not hugely inappropiate'. I was terribly tempted by the 'Cry Havoc' line but restrained myself :D Anyway courtesy of wikiquote, so if there are any mistakes, there not mine; here it is:
O, that a man might know
The end of this day's business ere it come!
But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known

Damn their eyes.....

So I'm thinking, what's my first post going to be about? Will I talk about something I've just read that sparked some really interesting questions on the nature of the freedom of the press, maybe I'll have a bit of a go at McDowell's 'reforms', I could link through to some of the especially interesting and original blogs I've been reading this past week. But I'm not going to do any of that. I'm going to rant, at length and with feeling, with ire and vitriol and bile and venom about my supervisor. This is after all, what is taking up the entirety of my consciousness at the moment.

I'm a librarian, and about three years ago it seemed the thing to do to, to get a Masters in my chosen(?) field in order to increase job and salary prospects etc. I considered the notion of going back into full time education and it's associated living on twenty euro a week, and rejected that option. So I study at night, distance learning over the net.

I pay just under two thousand pounds sterling a year in tuition. This year I have received in return for my two grand, two emails. So that works out (in case you're behind me here) at one thousand pounds per email. Last email received 29th November, 2006. So I have, at approximately weekly intervals, been sending off increasingly nasty emails, to supervisor, course coordinator, dept EO, and indeed anyone else I can think of. No response. Eventually course coordinator says he'll have a word. This was in January by the way.

Coordinator today responded to a missive from me that was one step down from a solicitor's letter. He very calmly explained that he had spoken to her and (I quote) 'asked her to get in touch'. I pointed out that this was all very well but she hadn't in fact done so. He suggested I should email her some of my drafts (again) and see what happens, see what happens.

This is appalling, surely? Is it just me that thinks this is absolutely loony? But they have a way of making you feel insane and completely unreasonable for asking for the education you've paid for. If I bought a toaster and got the thing home and there was no toaster in the box -- no problem, money back or decent toaster. But because this is education, (and this is an internationally recognised university, and the dept has quite a high profile in the industry), no one seems to feel in any way compelled to provide a quality (or in fact existing) product. No apology, no will try harder, no let's see how we can make up for the immense mental and emotional trauma you are suffering. Perhaps I am supposed to be grateful merely for the honour of my name appearing in their auspicious enrolment lists.

I now hate the woman, with the all the intensity that a pavlovian response to extended stress, worry and frustration can bring. And I'm stuck with her till I have the wretched dissertation in. This I just know, is going to be a quality working relationship.

A word about the profiles

These probably look what they are, the ramblings of four very drunk women. The idea, and it's one of those ideas that looks especially good after the third bottle of wine, is that no one would write their own profile but that it would be written by the other three instead. We figured this would give us a bit of kick start with the blogging as well - as something to argue against so to speak. For this cunning plan to suceed a certain degree of informality and creativity was needed, and a glass or so of wine seemed appropriate. Unfortunately by the time we actually got round to the blog thing we were all well and truely smashed; this proved to be less sucessful (grammer-wise anyway). Anywho the whole point of this is to point out we are not actually illiterate lunatics, and the whole thing will be cleaned up at some point in the near future. Just not quite yet, since right now is glorious, redemptive coffee.