No country for old mogs

Well here we are, back in dear old Blighty, the country whose inhabitants have every reason in the world to be worried indeed: The country's plumbing is essentially a piece of Victoriana nicked from a working museum, THE CREDIT CRUNCHY has slowed down sales of UGG-boots, skinny jeans and Red Bull to a worrying extent, 98.7% of Britons believe the earth is a 48-year old Blue Peter experiment and The Battle of the Girl Giants is likely to be won by the new Queen of Hearts and her criminal consort.

To cite that marvellous snob Noel Coward: There are bad times just around the corner - and there's no reason to indulge the optimistic belief that obese, inert and generally gaga Britain can take it.

This country is doooooomeed.

So, Britons ought to be worried about all those truly terrifying things that await them - and yet what do they seem to fear most (after flying, at least if you try to answer that question with the help of dubious research methods conducted on the internet)?

Cats. As in kitties. Pussymogs.

This is a displacement activity with distinct Jungian undertones, if you ask me. It's all about the all-engulfing cosmic maternal yoni.

Let me die, let me die, surrounded by machines

A little Nachtmusik for Friday.

Which comes from this pretty remarkable looking songwriter get-together that I linked to before.

John Darnielle does a track from what I hope to be a real side-project, and his introduction to the song helps to maybe partly explain why I feel drawn to his music, seeing that in his youth he 1) was a stoner 2) read a lot of science fiction and 3) listened to a lot of prog rock.

That sounds awfully familiar.

This wasn't a very rare set of characteristics for boys in the 1980s, I know, but it was not quite universal.

(In my case, though, it wasn't really so much about Genesis).

And this song seems to combine these elements pretty well.



The other song is from the Weakerthans songwriter, John K. Samson, and it's quite a lovely...um...tribute to his hometown.

'It's always February', he says, 'in the soul of Winnipeg.'

Storage solutions

Apparently there's been some brouhaha over the comment by New York's new Hillary-replacing senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, that she keeps two rifles under her bed. The weapons have since been moved to a more secure hiding place, apparently out of concern that their previous location had been revealed.

This is the occasion for Michael Schulman at The New Yorker to pose somewhat snarky questions to Thomas H. King, president of the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association about 'where to hide your rifles'.

We do learn, though, just in case you were wondering, about a few bad ideas for gun storage.

Like:

One place to avoid: the refrigerator. “It would probably cause rust because of the moisture.”

Very helpful.

I like King's responses at the end:

King, who lives about thirty-five miles from Gillibrand’s house, added that he owns rifles himself, but wouldn’t say how many (“That’s none of your business”) or where he keeps them (“That’s none of your business, either”). He did confirm, however, that they are not under his bed.

In Germany, in case you're interested in these things, the law requires all firearms to be stored, unloaded, in safes. The ammunition has to be kept seperately (and not in the refrigerator).

Where the safe resides?

None of your business.

Springtime for Winslet?

Is it just me, or is this headline in today's Mirror about the whole Kate Winslet-The Reader brouhaha kind of ... funny?


Yeah, because what you really want is to coast into Oscar-Night on a wave of pro-Nazi sentiment.

Bogotá am Rhein

One of the many things I learned while reading Marek Kohn's much-recommended book Dope Girls was that there was a time when the leading cocaine production powerhouse in the world was...Germany.

I did not know that.

Kohn notes:

Agreement was reached in principle, at the Hague in 1912, to limit the use of opium, morphine and cocaine to 'legitimate medical purposes', but in practice it was stymied by the commercial interests of Germany, the world's leading cocaine manufacturer, and Britain, which dominated the world's morphine industry. (42, emphasis added)

Indeed, the process of isolating the active ingredients from coca leaves was pioneered by a Göttingen grad student, Alfred Niemann. Niemann not only named the alkaloid that he isolated 'cocaine', he also wrote his dissertation on the topic, which was published in 1860. (Niemann, sadly, died the following year.)

As H. Richard Friman observes in a 1999 essay, by the 1880s, the German pharmaceutical company Merck was the 'prime source for cocaine'.*

One of Merck's later rivals, I was interested to see, was C.H. Böhringer, which is located, not far from here, in Ingelheim am Rhein.

After the First World War, due to a variety of issues, Germany followed trends elsewhere and moved toward regulation of the drug. However, it appears to have remained a key producer of the (increasingly criminalised) drug at least through the 1920s.

Which brings me to another of the articles I ran across recently.

Cocaine in His Socks.

Arrest of London Man Who Made Frequent Visits to Germany.

Paris, Monday.

With cocaine in his socks, a Londoner living in a small Paris hotel was arrested by the Paris police in a Montmartre night restaurant.

The man, has been a frequent visitor to Berlin, coming back always with a load of flash jewellery,which he sold in Paris cafés and night restaurants.

The cocaine smugglers are busier than ever trying to bring secret stocks into France from Germany. Much of the narcotics which are thus fraudulently introduced across the French frontier eventually reach England.

Two days ago the French frontier police at Forbach found in the Wiesbaden—Paris express a huge store of contraband, of which cocaine done up in tiny glass tubes formed a large part. Eight men have been arrested, and the French police have obtained warrants against a number of German exporters.

(The Daily Mirror, 2 May 1922, 4)

Ah, night cafés in Montmartre and international express trains. That's the drug underground as it should be. Better that than Scarface.

These days, of course, this part of the Rhineland is far more famous for a different drug.


*'Germany and the Transformations of Cocaine, 1860-1920', in Cocaine: Global Histories, ed. Paul Gootenberg (Routledge, 1999), 83-104, p. 84.

A note to Bristol Palin

From a German perspective, to call one's baby "Tripp" is a trifle ambiguous. For "Tripper", as you probably won't know Swansea Nuneaton Bristol, is a colloquial (to put it mildly) German term for "the clap".

Now of course it's highly unlikely that anybody in Wasilla middle school would call your little nipper "Tripper" during recess, with the express intention to make a nasty joke worthy of a Pinkerian analysis at his expense. But (even) you must admit that in the right light, and from the right angle your child's name might be seen as infelicitous.

And of course the clap is the last thing we would wish upon that innocent little babby of yours. Especially as he is doomed to live in this naughty cesspit of immorality that is our world, where - as you have (almost) candidly garbled pointed out yourself - abstinence is one heck of an unrealistic idea.

Naked mole rats have particularly perky proteins, yay!

One of the weirdest dreams I've had in recent years featured a children's book with a cartoonish cover in hot pink decorated with sparkly stuff called "Billie, Stefan and the Naked Mole Rat."

Honi soit qui mal y pense. We don't do Freudian dream analysis in this house anymore.

The dream was so vivid it felt more like a memory, and immediately on getting out of bed I embarked upon a deep online search for a book which - for about two waking hours - I was convinced I had read at one point of my life.

'Course I didn't find the book - it had been a figment of my imagination, after all. My great brain, having nowt better to do, made it all up.

Ever since then, the naked mole rat has had a particular place in our personal mythology, ugly as hell though it is.


And this is why I was happy to learn today via Der Spiegel that the amazing longevity of the naked mole rat is down to the species's unusually stable proteins. These hideous creatures can live to thirty years in their underground burrows, doing whatever it is naked mole rats are doing and not get bored for a second.

Which is more than can be said about many human beings I know.

All the things we've sewn together, splitting at the seams

How awesome is John Darnielle?

So awesome that he overcomes poor sound quality.



John D., 'My Inner Joan Crawford Vehicle.'

American nightmare

This is the World Press Photo of the Year 2008:


Taken by Anthony Suau, it shows, as the WPP site explains:

an armed officer of the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department moving through a home in Cleveland, Ohio, following eviction as a result of mortgage foreclosure. Officers have to ensure that the house is clear of weapons, and that the residents have moved out.

It is certainly...striking.

Der Spiegel has a nice collection of the other winners.

I, too, once had a Quick Curl Barbie*

Fascinating stuff that takes me back via David Thompson. Not joking. These photos make the production of Barbie dolls appear like fine art.

* I had the blonde one in the pink dress. I remember to this day how, on my birthday (my fourth, I believe), my mother came into my bedroom early in the morning, holding the doll that apparently I had craved so intensely in the pool of orangey light made by the basket-weave lamp. Her smile was eerie. It said: "Child, this is your future ...."

Sadly, Barbie didn't curl as quickly as the name promised. Or rather: it quickly curled into a wiry mass, making Barbie look vaguely like my granny. Especially with the 'seventies maxi-dress she was wearing.

Oh well, I reckon you all wanted to know that ....

The Daily Nail ....

... don't you just love it?

Keeping Track

For those few of you who are interested in such things, we have both recently updated our lecture/publication lists (his 'n' hers) and, where possible, provided links.

Some of the latter, unfortunately, require subscriptions or research library access, but a few are free.

Knock yourselves out.

Alien Moment

Since even the normally serious-thinking Ophelia over at B&W has taken to talking about trout-pout octomum (I agree with Ophelia: those lippy things are not Ms Suleman's own), I thought I might chip in, having formed a vehement opinion of my own about this particular case of egomania.

This is truly horrifying.

On suffering

So, I had read this New York Times article last week and was unsure about how to put my feelings about it into words.

Ezra does better:

The New York Times article on how hard it will be for senior executives to live in New York on $500,000 is the sort of thing that makes me want to burn this rotted society to the ground and salt the earth atop which it once stood.

Yeah, that's about right.

Disharmonic convergence

I experienced an interestingly discordant moment at the Guardian just now.

(Click for larger image.)

Yes, there I was reading a story on Geert Wilders when I noticed that the ad that popped up (in German, as it had recognised the location of my IP address) was for an... international Muslim internet dating service! ('See photos now!')

Chance? Or some techie's subtle sense of humour at work?

Darwin for afters

Someone just dropped by having found us while looking for 'Darwin themed desserts'. (Yeah, we get an astounding amount of visitors looking for tasty treats here. They must be so disappointed.)

Anyway, may I recommend, perhaps, glazed beetle?

Or some crunchy frog?

Saints and scholars

Thank you, Guardian, for getting it so wrong, today of all days....

'Secular saint' is up there with 'evangelical atheist' amongst my least favourite terms.

For a corrective, see Dale's evaluation of Darwin's writing, which concludes:

Then again, maybe Charles Darwin could not help but write so eloquently. He was, after all, not a saint.

Exactly.

By the shadowy and inconclusive light of contingency

I don't know nearly as much as I would like about American history, and I'm no expert on Abraham Lincoln.

However, there are a couple of excellent passages in Wilfred W. McClay's essay at Humanities on the sixteenth president:

Out of respect to the man, we should at least try to recover a sense of both the grandeur and the contingency of the history that he lived through, and helped to shape. To see a statesman in full, and thereby learn something about the nature of statesmanship, one needs to see him not only in the overly clear light of retrospection, but in the shadowy and inconclusive light of the conditions he faced as they were unfolding. “I claim not to have controlled events,” Lincoln mused during the course of his presidency, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”

[...]

We need to remember that this is often how history happens. Background music does not swell at the crucial moment, and trumpets do not sound, when the events of history are actually taking place. The orator or the soldier has to wonder whether he is acting in vain, whether the criticisms of others are in fact warranted, whether time will judge him harshly. Few great men have felt this burden more completely than Lincoln.

We also need to remember how likely it seemed to Lincoln and others that he would lose the 1864 election, and thereby experience ignominious defeat and see the disintegration of the Union cause as he had fought for it. Had it not been for the miracle of Sherman’s and Grant’s decisive victories in the field, such a defeat at the polls would have been likely, as the American people had grown weary of this frustrating struggle. Add to this bleak outlook the weight of Lincoln’s relentlessly self-examining and depressive temperament and his constant, lonely struggles with a crippling sense of failure, and the sheer resiliency of the man becomes awe-inspiring, in ways a marble temple could never convey.

Having been no stranger (in my own humble way) either to relentless self-examination or an occasionally debilitating sense of failure, there is much to agree with there.

Bitchin' Camaro

Winning the Obscene Desserts Award for the Best Metaphor to Explain the Current Economic Crisis (At Least This Week): Thers, at Whiskey Fire:

So, in conclusion, we're all fucked because of crazy drunken teenaged priests using your credit cards to buy each other Camaros.

Extra points were awarded for embedding a Dead Milkmen song and making it seem like it was relevant.


The Dead Milkmen: 'Methodist Coloring Book'

‘You know, Bob, Darwin really knew a lot of biology.’

As we have for the past couple of years, we join some of our friends in marking the 200th birthday of one of the more remarkable individuals our species has brought forth, Charles Darwin. (And, this year, we'd suggest you also raise a glass to the equally aged Abraham Lincoln, who was not only a remarkable primate himself but who has long been especially regarded -- by one of us -- as a fellow Illinoisan.)

I have little to add to the general festivities, other than, perhaps, to again post this image of Darwin, which I like since it shows him a bit younger and less austere than most portraits.


He's sans beard, you'll note, but the extraordinary sideburns hint at the (ahem) tangled bank to come.

There will be countless articles on Darwin today, but I thought one at the New York Times by Nicholas Wade was worthwhile.

It concludes:

Historians who are aware of the long eclipse endured by Darwin’s ideas perhaps have a clearer idea of his extraordinary contribution than do biologists, many of whom assume Darwin’s theory has always been seen to offer, as now, a grand explanatory framework for all biology. Dr. Richards, the University of Chicago historian, recalls that a biologist colleague “had occasion to read the ‘Origin’ for the first time — most biologists have never read the ‘Origin’ — because of a class he was teaching. We met on the street and he remarked, ‘You know, Bob, Darwin really knew a lot of biology.’ ”

Darwin knew a lot of biology: more than any of his contemporaries, more than a surprising number of his successors. From prolonged thought and study, he was able to intuit how evolution worked without having access to all the subsequent scientific knowledge that others required to be convinced of natural selection. He had the objectivity to put aside criteria with powerful emotional resonance, like the conviction that evolution should be purposeful. As a result, he saw deep into the strange workings of the evolutionary mechanism, an insight not really exceeded until a century after his great work of synthesis.

And, once again, here's the closing sentence from the Origin of Species, which I always like to imagine being read in the voice of James Earl Jones.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.