Horizon

That highly refined lit bio biz

John Betjeman's unauthorized biographer learns too late that an apparent smoking-gun letter is not only fake but also contains an unsubtle coded message.

A Biased and Deceptive Manner

For reasons I can't quite place, I've been skimming over the charts from a lenthy tax/income analysis at Rational Revolution. The author's point is roughly that the rich are very rich, and that the tax system is insufficiently progressive, and so on. Honestly, I couldn't be bothered with much of the commentary after reading the caption to this graph:

What this shows is that for men there has been a general stagnation in terms of income for the average American worker since the 1970s.

No doubt that's one thing the graph shows, though there might be another interesting trend there as well. Later we read:

Many "respected" institutions, such as CATO are continuing to present information on taxation and income in a biased and deceptive manner.

Links for the Road

Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter has switched to blog format. They seem to have done something strange with the TypePad page navigation, but it's still an incredible source of technology news for genealogists and amateur historians. Plus, how can you pass up a post titled "Cows & Sheep: the Enemy"?

The Daily WTF has become a daily read for me. It's a collection of really bad technology ideas, which ranges from code snippets to management blunders. I'm not sure whether my favorite is the error popup titled "NO! -- Bad User!" or the Kafkaesque comments to an XSLT processor.

I spent most of yesterday evening reading HoustonFreeways.com and its sister site TexasFreeway.com. Both are collections of photo essays by highway enthusiasts in search of the eccentric and the historical. Worth checking out are the movies of a swing bridge working and the archive photos of traffic measurement in Houston.

To my delight, several pages describe State Highway 87 between Sabine Pass and High Island. This was the most direct route between my hometown and the beach, but with erosion working at 8-10 feet per year, it was always in peril of washing away. I remember looking out of the car at the speed limit signs sitcking up out of the waves, and thinking about the previous three roads the Gulf had taken. Once we were overtaken by a cattle drive, as cowboys on horseback used SH 87 to transfer their herd from one McFaddin pasture to another. As I recall, my father drove very slowly as the animals flowed around our Toyota Starlet.

Language Instruction Lamentations

In the preface to the 1942 Scientific German for Intermediate Students, the author — one Harold F. Lenz of Queens College — laments the state of foreign language instruction:

What is most likely to be discarded in these days of streamlined "reading method" are the features involving active use of German in oral and composition work. The author urges that they be retained. He agrees that it is preposterous — in the time usually allotted to languages in the curriculum — to try to teach the student to speak, write, or even read like a native. But in the final analysis we are doomed by human nature to "learn by doing." Mere sight of things, silent contemplation and cerebration — no matter how profound — leave us with shadowy and lifeless impressions.

So That's Why My Tax Dollars Pay for Luxury Boxes

After reading the Oxford Press dialogue with two authors of books on the fall of Rome, I'd intended to have a bit of fun. Both authors explain how unfashionable it is to describe the end of the Empire as a undesirable thing, and are a bit defensive about their negative view of the barbarian invasions. I'd planned to do a tongue-in-cheek rant about "cultural relativists" and political correctness overriding common sense in Ancient History. Sounds more fun than the "War on Christmas," right?

Unfortunately for my attempt at satire, it turns out that Heather and Ward-Perkins aren't being paranoid at all. The first volume of the 2005 Cambridge Medieval History addresses the late Roman Empire in its early essays, spending page after page on "continuity theory." Sure, urban centers may have collapsed, but the ruling classes were moving out to the countryside in Constantine's day. The bronze coinage used by the majority of the population fluctuated wildly before disappearing, but the gold solidus retained its value. You can't describe as a decline, really, since conditions had been getting steadily worse since the third century.

The easiest rebuttal I can offer is this story from Norbert Schoenauer's 6000 Years of Housing, describing a post-apocalyptic landscape rivalling anything out of Hollywood (pp. 219-220):

In those parts of Europe that were not occupied by the Moors or Saracens, frequent barbarian incursions diminished and disrupted city life. Large cities lay in ruins, and their few surviving citizens sometimes became mere squatters in a single Roman building. Arles, in southern France, for instance, served as the prefecture of the Gauls and was known as Arelate during the Roman Empire. Although pillaged in 270, it was restored and embellished once again by the Romans to its former beauty. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the city was occupied by the Visigoths and in 730 plundered and destroyed by the Saracens. The few surviving inhabitants took refuge within the protective walls of their amphitheater. The confines of this large Roman edifice — seating capacity was 25,000 — became the setting of an emerging medieval fortress town. With the exception of two gateways, the lower two stories, consisting of sixty arcades, were walled in and adapted to dwellings. The third-floor arcade was demolished, and the building materials so gained were used to complete the fortification installations and to build on the level site of the arena a church, chapels, and additional houses. This compact fortress settlement with its four defense towers survived the vicissitudes of many subsequent centuries and was still in existence as an identifiable city precinct at hte beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was demolished to free the Roman ruins from their medieval appendices.

This adaptation of amphitheater to a medieval fortress city was not unique. In similar circumstances the inhabitants of Nîmes, another city of southern France, transformed their amphitheater into a small medieval city of 2,000 inhabitants served by two churches. The arcades of the theater were filled in with masonry walls and served as the ramparts of the town.

POW Camps Make For Strange Bedfellows

Via Amy Welborn:

The German and Italian press have been covering a side-story to Günter Grass's service in the Waffen-SS. Apparently he passed his time in a POW camp hanging out with Joseph Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI. From a collection of translated Italian news articles on the story:

Grass, who would become an active pacifist, was wounded in combat in 1945, then captured by the Americans and kept in a POW camp.

"Together with other 17-year-olds," he remembers, "I was in the lager of Bad Aibling, where some 100,000 POWs were interned without a roof, and when it rained, some of us crouched together in a hole we had dug in the ground over which we stretched a tarp to protect us from the rain."

"One of my fellow POWs was named Joseph, he was very Catholic, and often spouted quotations in Latin. We became friends and we played dice together, because I managed to get a dice jar in the lager. To pass the time, we chatted and speculated about the future, as boys often love to do. I wanted to become an artist, while he wanted to enter into the service of the Church. He gave me the impression of being a bit awkward, but he was a most likeable type. This is a beautiful story, don't you think?"

My frequent naps are justified, study finds

Evidence that "napping supports abstract learning".

I seem to remember reading somewhere that Einstein was an advocate of afternoon naps. I always tell people that, but do they listen?

It makes sense to me. Abstract thinking may require the softening of sharp distinctions to some degree. Having a fuzzier memory may in fact help in making generalizations and noticing patterns.

Food French/Food Frankish

There's a fun thread over on Languagehat today about the word "vindaloo", which is apparently derived from a Portugese word for garlic wine sauce, and not Indian at all. In addition to the obligatory flamewar about cooking marinated meats, the commenters point to other examples of borrowing culinary terms and techniques from unexpected sources. Fish tacos, for example, came to Baja California from Portugal, via Japan.

Trade isn't the only way to acquire cooking terms, however. Anyone who's studied a bit of casual sociolinguistics knows that English got its name-of-animal/name-of-meat distinction from the Norman Conquest. English peasants slaughtered a cow, but at the table of their French-speaking lords, it became beef. The same applied to swine/pork, chicken/pullet, deer/venison, calf/veal and so on.

But where did French words themselves come from? Many of the cooking terms we've borrowed from French show Germanic origins, probably dating from Frankish rule:

• English broil was borrowed from brûler. But brûler was apparently a portmanteau of usler (of Latin origin) and bruir/broïr ("to burn"), from the Germanic *brojan.
• Growing up in the western marches of Cajun country, I ate plenty of crawfish étouffé. étouffer itself means "smothered", and is likely an alternation of Old French estoper. That makes it a cognate of stop, which an étouffé fan is unlikely to do.
• French rôtir comes from the Germanic verb *raustjan. I have no idea if the English word is borrowed from rôtir or inherited from the proto-Germanic root.
• My favorite of the the Frankish/French terms is "soup". French soupe, comes from Frankish *suppa. The meaning, however, shows a delightful semantic drift. Soupe originally meant not a stew-like meal, but slice of bread to be dipped in broth. The term came to refer to the dish itself, and then just ot the dipping sauce. That's the meaning English borrowed when the Normans invaded. But whatever happened to the English cognate for *suppa? It's still around, in sop.

You could be next

If you sleep with the fan on, this timely expose could save your life.

Ancient scripts the answer to modern advertising woes

The Chinese Olympic committee has decided to use seal script as the inspiration for its olympic icons.

Looking at examples of previous icon sets provided on that page, it's obvious that olympic icons have tended either to have a now very tired, bland modern style or very conservative antique styles. The Athens icons appear to be based on an ancient Greek style, which is predictable. Interestingly, so are Atlanta's. Lillehammer's look a bit like cave paintings, while Salt Lake City's are obviously based on the Native American stone engravings you find in that part of the country (I've seen some myself in Colorado).

It is interesting how the conflict between conservative ancio-philia and forward-looking utopianism is visible in something as simple as the Olympics' official icons.

Discussion at Pinyin News.

Stay out of Malaysia if you want to name your child "Stupid Imp"

...or Stinky Head.

Colville at Cambridge

I'm up to October 1941 in Colville's Fringes of Power. At this point, he's left his position as Churchill's privy secretery to serve in the RAF as an enlisted man. There's lots to chew on in his account of training at Cambridge:

When not on guard I could escape to dine with friendly dons at Trinity and other colleges, though there were those who looked askance at anything so common as an A.C.2 at the High Table.

I set that right on discovering that Bachelors of Arts in the armed forces could be admitted to the degree of Master of Arts for a fee of £1. When I duly presented myself in the Senate House, the Vice Chancellor announced in Latin (using the old pronunciation) that I was the first man ever to be admitted to that degree in the uniform of the Other Ranks of His Majesty's forces. So I acquired the right to dine at the Trinity High Table free of charge four times a year and presumably still can.

Figuring Out What You Like

Paul Graham has a new column on deciding what to imitate. Copy the things you really like, he says. But how do you figure out what that is?

Another way to figure out what you like is to look at what you enjoy as guilty pleasures. Many things people like, especially if they're young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them. 99% of people reading Ulysses are thinking "I'm reading Ulysses" as they do it. A guilty pleasure is at least a pure one. What do you read when you don't feel up to being virtuous? What kind of book do you read and feel sad that there's only half of it left, instead of being impressed that you're half way through? That's what you really like.

He's right, of course, but his advice isn't very useful. My guilty pleasures are Matt Helm novels and viking metal. These do not easily transfer to writing software. But maybe I just haven't tried hard enough.