The Power of Procrastination

Last term I went to a fine talk by Jorge Cham called 'The Power of Procrastination' in which he pointed us to the glories of such arch procrastinators as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. One he left out, though, was Leonardo da Vinci.

It seems that

'Leonardo rarely completed any of the great projects that he sketched in his notebooks. His groundbreaking research in human anatomy resulted in no publications — at least not in his lifetime. Not only did Leonardo fail to realize his potential as an engineer and a scientist, but he also spent his career hounded by creditors to whom he owed paintings and sculptures for which he had accepted payment but — for some reason — could not deliver, even when his deadline was extended by years. His surviving paintings amount to no more than 20, and five or six, including the "Mona Lisa," were still in his possession when he died. Apparently, he was still tinkering with them.

Nowadays, Leonardo might have been hired by a top research university, but it seems likely that he would have been denied tenure. He had lots of notes but relatively little to put in his portfolio.

Leonardo was the kind of person we have come to call a "genius." But he had trouble focusing for long periods on a single project. After he solved its conceptual problems, Leonardo lost interest until someone forced his hand. Even then, Leonardo often became a perfectionist about details that no one else could see, and the job just didn't get done.'

I had no idea of this, though it rather tallies with the notebooks that were on display at the Chester Beatty Library a year or so ago: page after page of densely detailed notes on hydrostatics with the occasional comment that he needed to be more organised, to manage his time better, to sort his life out.

The article's well worth reading, and makes a serious if counterintuitive case, though its definition of 'genius' is - at best - contentious.

Origins of the Crusades

I got a bit carried away the other day when sending a couple of links to a friend of mine. She's been studying Arabic, and I thought she'd be interested in some books that have recently come out exploring the contribution of the Muslim world to science in the medieval period. I felt, though, that while the books I'd alerted her to certainly looked interesting, they nonetheless went too far.

Islamic thought and learning transformed medieval Christendom beyond recognition, Lyons writes. A key import was natural philosophy, the precursor to modern science, and the idea that came with it: the notion of a university as an intellectual, cultural and social institution. Roger Bacon, the 13th-century English scientist and philosopher, travelled through Muslim Spain dressed as an Arab and was among the first to teach natural philosophy in Paris. Without these imports, Lyons says, the Renaissance would not have been possible and European “progress” as we know it would have been inconceivable. The Arabs gave Europeans their ideological and intellectual identity - indeed, Lyons suggests, “the West” itself is a Muslim invention.

But the West's gratitude to Islam was expressed in its wilful forgetting of the Arab legacy. This process began with the successors of Adelard and Scot and had four core themes: Islam distorts the word of God; it is spread solely by the sword; it perverts human sexuality; and its prophet, Muhammad, was a charlatan, an anti-Christ. It was thus necessary to write the Arab learning out of history and to claim direct descent from Greece. As Petrarch, one of the most prominent 14th-century anti-Arab intellectuals, declared: “I shall scarcely be persuaded that anything good can come from Arabia.”

So summarises the Times reviewer, but the Wall Street Journal one is far more alert to the shortcomings of The House of Wisdom:

Mr. Lyons's narrative is vivid and elegant, though marred at times by tendentiousness. Medieval Muslims, as he says, did find Europeans uncouth as well as brutal. (Though Mr. Lyons doesn't mention it, medieval Muslims were shocked to realize that "the Franks" were ignorant even of such refinements as underarm deodorants.) Mr. Lyons is right to remind us of the spectacular savagery of the Crusaders who waded knee-deep in blood through the Holy Sepulchre and of the embarrassing inability of Europeans to tell time once the sun had set.

But he hammers the point too insistently, as if to elevate Islam by diminishing European civilization to crude farce, and at the very time when it, too, was beginning to launch its own projects of philosophical speculation and scientific inquiry.

Me being me, though, I found it difficult to just send the links and leave it at that. I felt a need to add what struck me as an important caveat, as it strikes me that the books appear to fall into the trap of portraying the medieval Muslims as sophisticated and peace-loving, and the Europeans as mere barbarians, with their barbarism culminating in the savagery of the Crusades. This approach is really just an example of propaganda - much of it anti-Catholic, in fact - which has settled into the popular mind since the Eighteenth Century.

It tends to depend on three things: an ignorance of modern scholarship of medieval Europe which has reached a point where the term 'Dark Ages' is almost taboo, now that we recognise the steady spread of learning and the sequence of renaissances following the fall of Rome; a willful blindness towards the halfway house that was the Byzantine Empire, which certainly doesn't fit the 'crude European' stereotype; and a docile accession to the myth that the Crusades were an act of unprovoked Christian aggression.

Contrary to what pretty much everyone believes, they were nothing of the sort. They were, put simply, a belated response to more than four centuries of Muslim aggression against the Christian lands.

In the century following Mohammed's death the Muslims had overran the Christian lands of Palestine and Syria, Cyprus and Rhodes, all of North Africa and most of Spain, their relentless expansion only being halted by the French under Charles Martel at Poitiers in 732. Even when I'd studied the Crusades as an undergraduate I used to think that things settled down after that. I couldn't have been more wrong.

Avignon soon fell, and Lyons was sacked a few years later. Saracen raids on Southern Europe from 800 on were a match for Viking ones in the North and Magyars in the East - that was a rough century to be European! Crete fell in 826, a 10,000-strong Saracen army took Rome in 846, sacking St Peter's, St Paul's, and the Lateran Basilica, and in 859 Sicily was lost to the Saracens, not to be regained for two hundred years. A permanent base was set up at a fortress between Rome and Naples enabling forty years of raids throughout the area, and a similar raiding centre was established towards the end of the ninth century near Toulon, enabling raids through Province and Liguria, and threatening the Alpine passes. Genoa fell in 935, and Sardinia was briefly taken in 1015, just a few years after the Church of Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem had been destroyed, with the tomb of Our Lord being desecrated.

By 1050, when things were looking far more hopeful for Christendom, with the Magyars and Vikings having been converted, with the Normans campaigning in Sicily, and the Spanish Reconquista well underway, things started getting much more ominous off in the east.

The Seljuk Turks had been converted to Islam and had given Islam an intense new dynamism. Christian Armenia and Georgia fell to them in 1064 and in 1068 the Byzantine Empire was invaded, being decisively defeated at Manzikert in 1071, paving the way for the collapse of Empire in the east and the Turkish settlement of what is now Turkey; within a decade most of Anatolia was in Turkish hands. It was this resurgence of Muslim aggression, raising the spectre of a repeat of the century after Mohammed's death, that basically caused the Crusades. The tipping point may have come with the Seljuk capture of Jerusalem in 1076.

The Pope's first appeal for western knights to help their Byzantine brethren went unheeded, but in 1095, by which point the Muslims were threatening Constantinople itself, having taken Nicea, site of the Church's first ecumenical council, the Byzantine Emperor beseeched the west for help, stressing the dangers the Seljuks posed to Christendom as a whole. This time the Pope's call at Clermont had a far greater effect, and the First Crusade was launched with the key aims of helping the Byzantines, securing the pilgrimage routes to the Holy Land, and retaking Jerusalem itself.

In short, then, the Crusades weren't an example of unprovoked barbaric Christian aggression against Islam - they were, in effect, a counterattack, the first centrally coordinated retaliation after more than four centuries of Muslim aggression against the Christian world and a response to what was perceived as the greatest Islamic threat in more than three hundred years.

There's no denying that they tapped too into a desire to end the constant petty wars that were the small change of medieval European life by sending the troublemakers abroad, and also fed off the aggression and triumphalism that went with the Spanish spirit of Reconquista, or indeed that they they weren't another example of the Norman expansionism that had led to their conquests in southern Italy, Sicily, and England, but in the main this analysis is pretty solid. These elements gave fuel to the fire, but that fire was lit in the first place for reasons that were wholly defensive and utterly defensible.

Of course, it all went wrong, I concluded. The Latins expected help from the Byzantines in recapturing their lands and reclaiming the Holy Land, but Byzantine shenanigans and doubledealing eventually led the Latins to go on effectively alone without help. Cue infighting, petty fiefdoms, bloodbaths in Jerusalem, Crusader kingdoms in the Levant, and several more increasingly ineffective Crusades, none of which - it has to be said - did Christianity much credit.

Yes, I got a bit carried away in that e-mail, I'm afraid. We all have our hobbyhorses, though.

On Reading Behind the Panels

I was chatting to Nigella the other day, and conversation got round to the the brilliant webcomic that is XKCD. We darted online, and I skipped to it, and we began to browse through it, and then, all of a sudden, I discovered that there are bonus punchlines, easter eggs, hidden footnotes that only appear when you do a mouseover on the strip itself.

Take the strip I've posted here, for example. Good, eh? Certainly Nigella is enthralled by it, and is sorely tempted to try it. And why wouldn't she? After all, if you go to the original strip on the site itself, and do a mouseover, you'll see a little box that adds that 'You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.'

My jaw dropped on discovering this, and we rushed through them, laughing at the punchline and then splitting our sides at the bonus ones. How had I not known this?

I e-mailed NMRBoy about when I left. 'XKCD,' I said, 'did you know that when you do mouseovers on the final panels there are odd messages there? I know, that sounds crazy. True, though.'

'They do that in all the best comics,' he replied, 'including mine. but also Dinosaur Comics too. Check it out!'

And I did.

The Intrepid Prawo Jazdy

I have very little patience with people who tell Irish jokes. Or Polish jokes, I suppose. I dunno, I reckon it's just that I grew out of Kerry jokes when I was, oh, ten or so. Maybe eleven. At a push. It may be why the Abderite jokes in To Philogelos rarely do it for me. Try substituting 'stupid person' in for the ethnic identity in the joke. If it's still funny, the joke works. If it doesn't work, but you'd laugh at it with the ethnic element intact, then you're a racist and a cretin. Sorry, but true.

Dara O'Briain has a fine routine in his Live at the Theatre Royal show were he talks about how Irish jokes aren't really done in Britain nowadays, except among a couple of moronic exceptions:

... but then, I'm Irish, and of all the people who've benefited from a good dose of political correctness on this island, it's been the Irish. 'Member the good old days with the jokes about how stupid we were? And then a memo went around some time in the eighties, where you all went 'Oh Jesus, we're not doing jokes about the Irish anymore,' and you went 'Oh, okay, fine,' and you just stopped, and thank you very much. A bit overdue, but thanks very much nonetheless.

'Cause we didn't really enjoy that kind of stuff, and it's good that we don't get that kind of reputation. Just so you know, there are still plenty of stupid people dotted around Ireland, but you're not allowed talk about them.

There was a fire engine called out last year, because there was a cat stuck up a tree in Limerick. The lads drove out, took the cat down, gave it back to the old woman. She said 'lads, will yeh have a glass of whiskey?' This is a completely true story. The lads said 'We will of course have a glass of whiskey. The other crew are on at the moment, it's fine.' So they had the glass of whiskey, they had another glass of whiskey, the whole town came out, had a bit of craic with the fire engine, life was good. Eventually they said 'Listen, we'd better go back now'. They waved goodbye to the village, they waved goodbye to the old woman, they got back into the fire engine, drove off, ran over the fuckin' cat.

Completely true story, and you're not allowed tell it.

And of course, the news this last week has given us a tale to rival it. Yes, it's the story of Prawo Jazdy, which the Irish Times reported as follows:

HE WAS one of Ireland’s most reckless drivers, a serial offender who crossed the country wantonly piling up dozens of speeding fines and parking tickets while somehow managing to elude the law.

So effective was his modus operandi of giving a different address each time he was caught that by June 2007 there were more than 50 separate entries under his name, Prawo Jazdy, in the Garda Pulse system. And still not a single conviction.

In the end, the vital clue to his identity lay not with Interpol or the fingerprint database but in the pages of a Polish-English dictionary. Prawo jazdy means driving licence.

In a letter dated June 17th, 2007, an officer from the Garda traffic division wrote that it had come to his attention that members inspecting Polish driving licences were noting Prawo Jazdy as the licence holder’s name.

“Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence,” he wrote.

“Having noticed this I decided to check on Pulse and see how many members have made this mistake. It is quiet [sic] embarrassing to see that the system has created Prawo Jazdy as a person with over 50 identities.

It's worth reading the whole tale, as it's quite amusing. Sadly, though, some BBC buffoon who didn't get the memo felt a need to glitz up the story a bit:

Details of how police in the Irish Republic finally caught up with the country's most reckless driver have emerged, the Irish Times reports.

He had been wanted from counties Cork to Cavan after racking up scores of speeding tickets and parking fines.

However, each time the serial offender was stopped he managed to evade justice by giving a different address.

But then his cover was blown.

There are some subtle distortions here that change the tone off the story to turn it into an Oirish joke. For the BBC it's a case of the Guards being eejits who were actively conducting a futile manhunt across the land, and being bamboozled by a wily Polish scam, whereas in fact the issue was fiftly unrelated errors and no attempt to join the dots. You can blame laziness for this, or sloppiness, but not institutional idiocy. It's a subtle point, I know, but an important one.

Sorry, this makes me sound a tad touchy, doesn't it? I'm not really, it's just, well, this is a completely true story, and you're not allowed to tell it. Well, you can, but tell it like it is. It's funny enough with racist implications.

And where's this 'Irish Republic' being spoken of anyway? Cork? It's very simple: under the Constitution the name of the country is 'Ireland,' and under the Republic of Ireland Act the description of the state is the 'Republic of Ireland'.

I'm fairly sure the BBC have a style guide that explains this. Calling it the 'Irish Republic 'is like calling the UK 'the British and Irish Monarchy'.

Satan fell by the Force of Gravity

I couldn't help but sigh the other day when I read on the BBC that a recent Vatican report has found that men and women apparently tend to sin in different ways. It was with a wry grin that I remembered an Anglican friend of mine -- now a clergyman, as it happens -- remarking back in March that when it comes to religion the mainstream media is utterly clueless.

If you remember last year's nonsense about Rome having drawn up a replacement list of seven modern deadly sins, something which never happened, you'll be suitably troubled by it being repeated a year later:

Traditionally, the seven deadly sins were considered: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth.

The Apostolic Penitentiary, one of the Vatican's most secretive departments, which fixes the punishments and indulgences handed down to sinners, last year updated its list of deadly sins to include more modern ones.

The revised list included seven modern sins it said were becoming prevalent during an era of "unstoppable globalisation".

These included: genetic modification, experiments on the person, environmental pollution, taking or selling illegal drugs, social injustice, causing poverty and financial greed.

Frankly, you should be suspicious of any article featuring lines such as 'one of the Vatican's most secretive departments, which fixes the punishments and indulgences handed down to sinners'. Has more than a whiff of Jesuits under the Bed about it, doesn't it?

This looks like a complete non-story, and certainly nothing even close to the lurid fantasy conjured up by the Times, which merrily repeats last year's gibberish, as do pretty much all the other reports I've seen on this; they all appear to be feeding off each other, with none of them bothering to check the source of the tale. For the Times this story is mainly an excuse to roll out some medieval stereotypes:

Sex discrimination is destined to continue in the scorching fires of Hell, according to a study approved by the Vatican which suggests that men are most likely to commit lustful sins whereas women are beholden to pride.

The men, it seems, are the ones whose souls end up being pelted with fire and brimstone, while the women's souls are more likely to be broken on a wheel.

What's actually happened here? Well, it seems -- and I'm working from incomplete reportage, so bear with me -- there's a new book out about St Thomas Aquinas' teaching on the seven capital vices, which is a rather better name for pride, anger, gluttony, lust and the rest than 'the seven deadly sins'. Father Wojciech Giertych, theologian to the papal household, has commented on this book in the Vatican's newspaper, and noted that personal experience seemed to confirm Aquinas' beliefs that men and women tend to sin differently, with men giving way most frequently to lust and gluttony, while women tended more towards pride and envy.

I'm not sure how the reported survey conducted by the 95-year-old Jesuit Roberto Busa factors into all this. Supposedly it is the result of a survey of confessional data conducted by Father Busa that has allowed the Vatican to rank the sins in this way. It doesn't sound likely, though, does it? A survey of confessional data? Confessional data? I'm not sure, but given the nature of the Confessional Seal, can there be such information? Are we to assume that Father Busa wrote to a load of priests, asking them to generalise on their experience of hearing confessions over the years? That doesn't sound very systematic, does it, especially for a scholar reportedly known for his computerised study of the works of St Thomas Aquinas...

Or is that the clue? Is it simply that Father Busa wrote a book on Aquinas' teaching on the seven capital vices, drawing on all manner of linguistic evidence, that being his speciality, and perhaps drawing on some sort of survey, and that Father Giertych commented on it in L'Osservatore Romano, saying that Aquinas' beliefs and Busa's findings tallied with his own experience?

I'm not saying that's what's happened, but it does sound rather more likely than the reports, doesn't it?

Honestly, if sports journalism was this lazy and sloppy -- let alone politics or business reporting -- then heads would roll. It's one of the reasons why I think John Allen is wrong to think that Rome needs to work on its PR -- no matter what it says or does, it's going to be misrepresented by the media.

Six from a Hundred?

It's Sister the Younger's birthday today, so breithlá shona di and all that.

In other news, I've been intrigued lately by all the Facebook memes that people are actually running with -- they've always been there, but over the past few weeks people seem far more likely to actually try them theirselves. Probably the one that has most intrigued me has been one with a list of books supposedly drawn up by the BBC, of which most people have read only six. Jen was the first person I saw who'd done it, having drawn it from Amanda, and since then I've seen a few more, most of which put me to shame, as though I reckon I've read 51 of the books, I'm seeing people passing sixty and seventy out there.

As a man said to me recently, I need to read more. Still, the ones I've read are in bold. The eleven in italics are ones that sit on my shelf, waiting for me to get my life sorted out and get stuck into them.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

But here's the thing. I was highly suspicious of the note when I first saw it, thinking the six-book figure was improbably low, that Bill Bryson's description of his travels round Britain sat very oddly among the novels, and that there was some curious duplication here, with Hamlet appearing as well as Shakespeare's Complete Works, and with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe sitting just a few places away from The Chronicles of Narnia in their entirety.

To be fair, I hadn't been alone in my scepticism. Jen had herself observed that

' ... the BBC is retarded if they think most people will have read only 6 books on this list. Come on. A lot of these you read in school.

I'm ashamed I've only read 34, but it's a VERY random list. Why Dan Brown's atrocity of a novel is on this list, I have NO idea. I looked at his sources, at an example of the quality of his writing and gagged.'

Where had this list come from? I seemed to have no logic behind it at all. And then just an hour or so ago, Px posted a list that was almost identical but seemed marginally more coherent. Romeo and Juliet had replaced Shakespeare's Complete Works, and Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter had taken the place of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, thus wiping out the duplication issue. But even allowing for these corrections, the list clearly struck her as peculiar:

Apparently (and I got this off someone else's page, so it MUST be true) this list was produced by the BBC and, worryingly, they reckon the average person has read about 6 on the list. Incidentally, I can think of several books that should be on there - the Guardian's recent list, which featured "The L-Shaped Room", "The Trial", "Mrs Dalloway" and "Ballet Shoes" was far more instructive :-)

So I frowned again, and had a quick rummage online, and it seems, according to this fellow who did all the legwork, that the list was drawn up as a result of an online poll for 2007's World Book Day, with The Guardian running the story and publishing the list on 1 March 2007.

2,000 people were apparently asked which ten books they couldn't live without. I guess this explains the oddness of a travel book, a play, a library of religious writings, and the complete plays and poems of Shakespeare in a list otherwise made up of 96 works of fiction, and perhaps the number of children's books on the list too. Certain childhood books always remain precious to us; of the small number of books that I take with me whenever I've moved, pride of place is given to the battered King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table I grew up with.

The claim that most people have read only six of these, is, however, something that appears to have been plucked from thin air. That's the only kind of air suitable for plucking things from, you know.

An Abderite and an Egghead walk into a bar

Mary Beard has an amusing piece in The Times today. It's a review of a new book on humour in ancient Greece, and Professor Beard naturally enough takes this opportunity to expound on the perverse delight that is To Philogelos, or The Laughter-Lover to the likes of you and me.

To Philogelos is basically a bumper fun joke book from the Fourth Century AD, and is strewn with such gems as:

“An Abderite saw a eunuch talking to a woman and asked if she was his wife. When he replied that eunuchs can’t have wives, the Abderite asked, ‘So is she your daughter then?’”

and:

“An egg-head doctor was seeing a patient. ‘Doctor’, he said, ‘when I get up in the morning I feel dizzy for 20 minutes.’ ‘Get up 20 minutes later, then’”

I know, hilarious, eh? Actually, these are just about the best jokes of the lot, despite Mary B's observation that many of gags in the book 'still seem vaguely funny'. If you have it in your university library, though, it's certainly well worth a gander, not so much for the jokes as for the commentary, which generally relates how some rather dusty-sounding German academics disagree about wherein the humour in certain jokes might lie.

You know, 'Delbrück 1902 believes this is a play on thyreos, but Wilamowitz 1906 and Teichner 1917 argue that the joke depends rather on a stereotypical contentiousness among Thyreans. Hall 1974 points out that references to mushrooms and wines are topoi in jokes of this sort. For a detailed study, see Gewürz 1979 .'

That sort of thing.

I suspect Jeeves would approve

Last night I went to Rochdale for my first time, despite having been warned by a couple of friends that I ought not to get my hopes up. That being as it may, I said, there are people there I've not seen in far too long, one of whom I tend to miss terribly, and she being the sort to make one think life is most definitely worth living, I felt a trip north was long overdue.

It was an interesting evening, to say the least, starting with the train journey where the Driver apparently coughed rather than announcing the names of each stops. Well, he may just have had trouble enunciating properly, which is a shame, as Oldham Mumps, Shaw & Crompton, and Milnrow are names that demand proper proclamation. Still, he rummaged deep down and found enough vowels and consonants to master 'Rochdale' moments before arriving.

The Kittybrewster met me at the station and we ambled towards a hostelry to meet her people, passing the improbably named Egyptian Palace on the way, and with a suitable gesture towards the impressive town hall, with its Waterhouse-designed tower that Hitler supposedly took a shine to back in the day. I'm not sure when -- perhaps he took a day trip to Rochdale during his almost certainly apocryphal sojourn in Liverpool?

Into the pub then, where drinks were bought before we settled outside, there to be danced at and serenaded by a young lady, more than a bit tipsy, whose trousers were undone and who casually gulped my pint, oblivious to my frown and the beseeching wails of her neglected boyfriend. She left after a while, as were to do soon enough, shortly after some local wags had hurled a bottle at a fellow drinking a few yards from us.

On then, past sinister alley after sinister alley, each one crying out for a police procedural show, and to a thrillingly concealed and deeply welcoming Smiths pub, where the Kittybrewster's Comrade-in-Arms was overcome by a vigorous and apparently interminable bout of hiccups. The day was saved, however, when the wonderful barmaid approached us with a broad smile and a mysterious brown object on a plate, insisting it be eaten. Eaten it was, and the hiccups were banished.

The object? A slice of lemon, sprinked with brown sugar and dowsed in Worcester sauce. Apparently it works every time. You learn something new every day, they say.

Clutching a couple of chortlesome gifts I joined the brigade in making our way to one last pub for one last drink, which may have seemed a tad extravagant, but given that I'll hardly be touching a drop over the next few months, that's surely fair enough.

Finally then off we went to the station for hugs and kisses and fond farewells. It was a fine night, and an all too rare pleasure. I shall have to return soon, if I'll be had.

The Greatest Gift

Well, yesterday saw our parish's Young Adults' Group -- or Young Adults' Society, as we've called it for palindromic effect -- have its first event, which I think was a great success all told. Basically a Jacob's Table thing, where everyone was to bring something for dinner, it astonished me by everyone actually doing just that. That's surely a good sign, as I was convinced only a couple of people would bother.

I made coddle again. It having gone off hitch-free last week, the first time I'd cooked it in two-and-a-half years, I reckoned a second sally was worth the effort. I was quite pleased with the result, but more pleased that there was far better eating available after mass. There aren't many of us yet, but that's allowed. These things should start small. Mustard seeds and all that.

It wasn't till I got home then that I even started to look at this week's Catholic Herald. I've made little progress so far, as I'm pretty swamped nowadays, but have at any rate read Ronald Rolheiser's column, which is particularly strong this week, based as it is on the idea of fidelity.

The greatest gift that we have to give is the promise of fidelity, the promise that we will keep trying, that we won't walk away simply because we got hurt or because we felt unwanted or not properly valued.

We are all weak, wounded, sinful, and easily hurt. Inside of our marriages, families, churches, friendships, and places of work, we cannot promise that we won't disappoint each other and, worse still, that we won't hurt each other. But we can promise that we won't walk away because of disappointment and hurt. That's all we can promise - and that's enough!

I've never been very good at walking away, and I often think that my life would probably be a lot easier if I were, but I think Rolheiser's right on this, as he is so often. The column's worth reading in its entirety.

Fifty Quotes

The other week I did one of those meme things on Facebook, where I posted fifteen quotes I liked a lot from fifteen films I liked a lot, to see if people could identify them. Amazingly -- to me at any rate -- nobody recognised lines from Seven Samurai, Rear Window, The Searchers, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and Cinema Paradiso.

This tells me that my friends don't really know films, or that they don't know me, or that they can't be bothered with meme nonsense of this sort. I'm hoping for the latter.

While thinking of my fifteen films and looking up the relevant memorable lines on IMDB, I couldn't help but think of how many films I wanted to quote from. In an ideal world, aside from the fifteen films I chose, I'd have picked fifty others for people to try to spot. Mind, I reckon people would have gotten confused.

Still, if you're bored, have fun looking at these and trying to see you if you recognise any of the lines. You know the way it works. Do it from memory or deduction or intuition -- don't go looking for answers online! I'll post them in a couple of weeks anyway. Enjoy...

1.
"Well, what do you think of it?"
"Well, the grammar is appalling. On the first page you've doubled two negatives, split an infinitive and missed out three commas.
Negatives, infinitives, commas... he prattles punctuation while France is in agony!"

2.
"Reckon I'm right popular. You a bounty hunter?"
"A man's got to do something for a living these days."
"Dyin' ain't much of a living, boy."

3.
"Don't tell me, it's a flat tire."
"I can't understand it. This car hasn't given me a lick of trouble in nearly 6 hours."

4.
"Have you ever seen any of your victims?"
"You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays."

5.
"Why not be a teacher? You'd be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one."
"If I was, who would know it?"
"You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that."

6.
"Now listen to me you benighted muckers. We're going to teach you soldiering. The world's noblest profession. When we're done with you, you'll be able to slaughter your enemies like civilized men."

7.
"I saw a strange thing today. Some rebels were being arrested. One of them pulled the pin on a grenade. He took himself and the captain of the command with him. Now, soldiers are paid to fight; the rebels aren't."
"What does that tell you?"
"It means they could win."

8.
"I have to leave you now. I'm going to that corner there and turn. You must stay in the car and drive away. Promise not to watch me go beyond the corner. Just drive away and leave me as I leave you."
"All right."
"I don't know how to say goodbye. I can't think of any words."
"Don't try."

9.
"Do you like our owl?"
"It's artificial?"
"Of course it is."
"Must be expensive."
"Very."

10.
"Okay, let's handle this thing logically. What exactly have you sworn?"
"I have sworn with my life's blood, none shall pass this way without my permission!"
"Well... May we have your permission?"
"Well I, uh... I... that is, uh... hm... Yes?"

11.
"The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her."
"What makes you think you have to conceal it?"
"She might find the idea objectionable."
"Then again, she might not."

12.
"Why Albania?"
"Why not?"
"What have they done to us?"
"What have they done FOR us? What do you know about them?"
"Nothing."
"See? They keep to themselves. Shifty. Untrustable."

13.
"Do you think I'm weird?"
"Definitely."
"No man, seriously. Am I weird?"
"Yeah, but so what? Everybody's weird."

14.
"It's very pretty."
"Yeah, I've been fooling around with it for a few months."
"It's a bit of a departure from what you normally play."
"It's part of a trilogy, a musical trilogy I'm working on in D minor which is the saddest of all keys, I find. People weep instantly when they hear it, and I don't know why."
"It's very nice."
"You know, just simple lines intertwining, you know, very much like - I'm really influenced by Mozart and Bach, and it's sort of in between those, really. It's like a Mach piece, really. It's sort of..."
"What do you call this?"
"Well, this piece is called 'Lick My Love Pump'."

15.
"Do you think the Welsh can do better than that, Owen?"
"Well, they've got a very good bass section, mind, but no top tenors, that's for sure."

16.
"I can put you in Queens on the night of the hijacking."
"Really? I live in Queens, did you put that together yourself, Einstein? Got a team of monkeys working around the clock on this?"

17.
"Sit down. What do you see here?"
"Bunkers, sir."
"What's in them?"
"Stuff they stole from Kuwait."
"Bullshit. I'm talking about millions in Kuwaiti bullion."
"You mean them little cubes you put in hot water to make soup?"
"No, not the little cubes you put in hot water to make soup."

18.
"What do I want? I'll tell you what I want! I want Ken Railings to walk in here right now, and say 'Pam Shortt's broken both her legs, and I wanna dance with YOU!' "
"Pam Shortt's broken both her legs, and I wanna dance with you."
"That was unexpected."

19.
"The Carthaginians defending the city were attacked by three Roman legions. The Carthaginians were proud and brave but they couldn't hold. They were massacred. Arab women stripped them of their tunics and their swords and lances. The soldiers lay naked in the sun. Two thousand years ago. I was here."

20.
"You've just got to tell them."
"That we lost Apollo 11?"
"Well, I wouldn't say that first."
"What would you say first?"
"How about 'hey, you'll never guess what happened...'"

21.
"No! I tell you no! I won't have you bringing some young girl in for supper! By candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap, erotic fashion of young men with cheap, erotic minds!"
"Mother, please...!"
"And then what? After supper? Music? Whispers?"
"Mother, she's just a stranger. She's hungry, and it's raining out!"
"'Mother, she's just a stranger'! As if men don't desire strangers! As if... ohh, I refuse to speak of disgusting things, because they disgust me! You understand, boy? Go on, go tell her she'll not be appeasing her ugly appetite with MY food... or my son! Or do I have tell her because you don't have the guts! Huh, boy? You have the guts, boy?"

22.
"You are in for a surprise."
"Am I?"
"Havin' a kid changes everything. There's burping, the midnight feeding, and the changing."
"You do any of that?"
"No. But I hear it's terrible. Then you spend years trying to corrupt and mislead this child, fill his head with nonsense, and still it turns out perfectly fine."
"You think I'm up for it?"
"You learned from the best."

23.
"Temper, temper. If I wanted nagging, I'd go back with my wife. I'm out. Who wants food?"
"What do you got?"
"I got, uh, brown sandwiches and, uh, green sandwiches. Which one do you want?"
"What's the green?"
"It's either very new cheese or very old meat."
"I'll take the brown."

24.
"What do you do for recreation?"
"Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback."

25.
"And you know, when you think about it, that's exactly what happens to us when we're born. We're dropped down a random chimney and we have to get on with the strangers we find there. Typical Chesterton there to describe a chimney as a kind of uterus."

26.
"Why do you doubt your senses?"
"Because a little thing can effect them. A slight disorder of the stomach can make them cheat. You may be a bit of undigested beef, a blob of mustard, a crumb of cheese. Yes. There's more gravy than of grave about you."
"More gravy than of grave?"
"What a terrible pun. Where'd you get those jokes?"
"Leave comedy to the bears, Ebenezer."

27.
"You claim you love her."
"I do love her!"
"Can you prove it?"
"Well give me time, sir. Fifty years will do."
"But can you prove it?"
"Well, can a starving man prove he's hungry except by eating?"
"Would you die for her?"
"I would, but, er, I'd rather live."

28.
"My mum always said: 'It's a dog-eat-dog world, son. You get them before they get you. Eat your greens. Stop embarrassing me in front of the neighbors. Maybe it would best if you leave home and never come back!' She wasn't even my real mum. She bought me from a man."

29.
"Sounds like a subdural hematoma to me."
"Oh, it does, does it? Well, it's not your job to diagnose."
"But I thought..."
"You thought, you thought. Just go. Three years of nursery school and you think you know it all. Well, you're still wet behind the ears. It's not a subdural hematoma. It's epidural. Ha."

30.
"But surely you must have some suspicion. Who work the heist rackets in this territory?"
"Beg your pardon, lady?"
"Oh really! I can't make myself much plainer. Which hoodlums around here specialize in toby jobs?"

31.
"Shall we let bygones be bygones?"
"Of course, mon ami. I told you she would break the spell!"
"I beg your pardon, old friend, but I believe I told you."
"No, you didn't. I told you!"
"You most certainly did not, you pompous, paraffin-headed peabrain!"
"En garde, you... you overgrown pocket watch!"

32.
"This will take brains, not brawn."
"You better believe it, and I'm loaded with both."

33.
"Judgment of any system, or a priori relationship or phenomenon exists in an irrational, or metaphysical, or at least epistemological contradiction to an abstract empirical concept such as being, or to be, or to occur in the thing itself, or of the thing itself."
"Yes, I've said that many times."

34.
"If I'm gonna front the band, I like the sound of 'Deco.'"
"Deco the bus conductor. Is that 'top-Deco' or 'bottom-Deco'?"

35.
"Do you eat oysters?"
"When I have them, master."
"Do you eat snails?"
"No, master."
"Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral?"
"No, master."
"Of course not. It is all a matter of taste, isn't it?"
"Yes, master."
"And taste is not the same as appetite, and therefore not a question of morals."
"It could be argued so, master."
"My robe, Antoninus. My taste includes both snails and oysters."

36.
"Sir, have you read Don Quixote?"
"I've practically lived it!"

37.
"Why if I had half a chance, I could make an entire movie using this stock footage. The story opens on these mysterious explosions. Nobody knows what's causing them, but it's upsetting all the buffalo. So, the military are called in to solve the mystery."
"You forgot the octopus."
"No, no, I'm saving that for my big underwater climax."

38.
"You're not afraid?"
"I wonder what I'd do in their place. The same thing."
"You'd throw stones?"
"In their place? Of course. And that goes for everyone I judged. Given their lives, I would steal, I'd kill, I'd lie. Of course I would. All that because I wasn't in their shoes, but mine."

39.
"I think the important thing is not to make it look like we're panicking."
"See, and I think the important thing is actually not to BE panicking."

40.
"Couldn't you like me, just me the way I am? When we first started out, it was so good; w-we had fun. And... and then you started in on the clothes. Well, I'll wear the darn clothes if you want me to, if, if you'll just, just like me."
"The color of your hair..."
"Oh, no!"
"Judy, please, it can't matter to you."

41.
"Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless distinguishable, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed."
"You're talking about mass murder, General, not war!"
"Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks."

42.
"I sure do miss my bed."
"You said that last night."
"No, last night I said I missed my wife, tonight I just miss my goddamn bed."

43.
"I don't like your manners."
"And I'm not crazy about yours. I didn't ask to see you. I don't mind if you don't like my manners, I don't like them myself. They are pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings. I don't mind your ritzing me drinking your lunch out of a bottle. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me."

44.
"Well, the little guy was kinda funny-lookin'."
"In what way?"
"I dunno... just funny-lookin'."
"Can you be any more specific?"
"I couldn't really say... He wasn't circumcised."

45.
"This place is uninhabitable."
"Give it a chance. It's got to warm up."
"Warm up? We may as well sit round this cigarette. This is ridiculous. We'll be found dead in here next spring."

46.
"I had to kill him."
"Oh, yeah. He's as dead as Julius Caesar... Would you rather it was you?"
"No, I would not."
"Well, then, you've done your job. Go home and sleep well tonight."

47.
"Verewolf!"
"Werewolf?"
"There."
"What?"
"There, wolf. There, castle."
"Why are you talking that way?"
"I thought you wanted to."
"No, I don't want to."
"Suit yourself. I'm easy."

48.
"I can't make out whether you're bloody bad-mannered or just half-witted."
"I have the same problem, sir."


49.
"Here, you look like a very happy couple, um, are you?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it?"
"Uh, I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say."
"And I'm exactly the same way."
"I see. Wow. That's very interesting. So you've managed to work out something?"

50.
"Lieutenant, in the next 15 minutes we have to create enough confusion to get out of here alive."
"Major, right now you got me about as confused as I ever hope to be."

Yeah, I know, but it should keep you thinking for a while, anyway.