I had been steadfastly avoiding pictures of Sarah Palin’s VP debate performance. It sounded a bit nauseating.
Well, yeah. (What a thing to inflict on your unsuspecting bloggy readers on a Sunday. Evil man.)
Palin could never get away with that schtick over here. Everybody would laugh and point and spread rumours that she must be Anne Robinson’s unacknowledged love child. Wink, wink.
Holy crap, Mandelson’s back.
So, the obvious questions. Correct predictions will definitely win a prize of some kind. (Signed photos?)
1. What scandal will get him chucked out this time?
2. How long will it take?
3. Or will he survive until the Tories get in?
Derek Draper, a former adviser to Mandelson who has recently returned to work for the Labour party, said: “I think Peter will prove to be a pretty formidable secretary of state, a really brilliant contributor to the strategy of the government and the presentation of the government and people will look at Peter and think: ‘You know what, we misjudge Peter Mandelson sometimes,’ and actually the strengths of Peter and the good side of Peter will come through now.
Um, yeah, of course.
The Department of Puritans Health has just come up with its official nine types of heavy drinker, blah blah blah.
From the Graun letters page today, spotting the remarkable similarities between their document and Richard Allestree’s 1659 The Whole Duty of Man, which identified the motives of “the multitudes of drunkards we have in the world”:
2008: “‘Border dependents’ regard the pub as a home from home”. 1659: Too obvious a point to need mentioning, since “an alehouse” was often a room in a neighbour’s home. 2008: “‘Community drinkers’ are motivated by the need to belong”. 1659: “Good-fellowship: one man drinks to keep another company at it”. 2008: “‘Re-bonding drinkers’ are driven by a need to keep in touch with people who are close to them”. 1659: “A second end of drinking is said to be the maintaining of friendship and kindness amongst men”. 2008: “‘Hedonistic drinkers’ crave stimulation and want to abandon control”. 1659: “A third end of drinking is said to be the chearing their spirits, making them merry and jolly”.
2008: “‘De-stress drinkers’ use alcohol to regain control of life and calm down”; “‘Depressed drinkers’ crave comfort, safety and security”. 1659: “A fourth end is said to be the putting away of cares”. 2008: “‘Boredom drinkers’ consume alcohol to pass the time”. 1659: “A fifth end is said to be the passing away of time”. 2008: “‘Conformist drinkers’ are driven by the need to belong”. 1659: “A sixth end is said to be the preventing of that reproach … cast on those that will in this be stricter than their neighbours”.
In 1659 Allestree has no direct parallel with today’s final category, “Macho drinkers”, but in 1660 the Royalists would be back, bringing libertines with them …
A toast or three is due to Kate Loveman, the author of the letter, methinks (ah hah: the culprit, if I’m not much mistaken).
New frocks for judges. The update’s only taken 3 centuries!
(Whatever would Bloody Jeffreys say?)
Update: mind you, as The Little Professor has just reminded us, academics are in no position to laugh at judges for wearing silly outfits that haven’t been in fashion for several centuries.
No, not Mayor Boris. That’s just absurd.
No, this is the shocker I discovered yesterday: Mel Gibson is to star in a movie remake of Edge of Darkness.
I haz a shiny book!
Publisher’s catalogue. (Amazon UK; Amazon US)
There’s summat curious going on here - the publisher’s told me that the price is £45 (which is probably what I’d expect - the Amazon UK price is £46.99), but their online catalogue says £35. So if you want a cheap copy, you’d better jump in there and order it quickly before they notice. Just sayin’.
It feels so good to have it out. I NEVER EVER have to touch this thing again!
The Times they are a-changing!
At what used to be The Times Higher Education Supplement, anyway. Now it’s Times Higher Education, it’s no longer owned by Murdoch, and it’s got a shiny new website full of FREE content - past and present. Woo hoo!!
(The print version has also become much shinier, although apparently the ink still rubs off on your fingers.)
Thanks to Alun for the hat-tip.
I have occasionally been worrying about my tendency to grumpiness in my blogging. But my New Year’s Resolution is this: I have realised that I am officially a Grumpy Old Bag now that I’m 40, so this is gonna be a Grumpy Old Blog whenever I feel like it.
Anyways… we have the latest Linguistic Luddites List* (H-T), or the ‘List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness’ from some university you’ve never heard of (publicity stunt much?).
Now there are always many, many new coinages out there that I detest (usually the latest ugly offerings from bureaucrats and middle management), but you know, the thing about a language is that it continually evolves and grows in unpredictable and not necessarily pretty ways or it dies, and if you’re going to object to neologisms you’ve got to have a better reason than ‘Ugh! Don’t like!’ or ‘The kids/damned Yanks/common people use it!’ or ‘We’ve got a word for that already!’.
I am particularly taken by this one, for idiocy:
AUTHORED — “In one of former TV commentator Edwin Newman’s books, he wonders if it would be correct to say that someone ‘paintered’ a picture?”
Firstly, ‘author’ as a verb is hardly new. The OED has examples of author as a verb going back to the 16th century, which makes it a couple of centuries younger than the noun.
And then the logic that the nouns ‘author’ and ‘painter’ must follow exactly the same grammatical rules? Why? Just because words sound in part similar doesn’t mean they were originally formed in exactly the same way or that they have to develop in lockstep thereafter. We don’t spell it ‘auther’, do we?
(Updated to note: Among verbs formed from nouns, I have my own little pet hates, so I’m as guilty as anyone. But I’m not sure why back-formation of this kind tends to generate so much opprobrium.)
***
* I know, this is unfair on Luddites, but we all love a little alliteration, don’t we?
You may have seen the story about a group of creationists who want to build a Christian theme park in Lancashire.
It was already one of those suspiciously detail-free stories - nothing concrete about locations or backers, a lot of aspiration and ’speculation’ - apart from the bit where the spokesperson admitted Wigan council has already refused them planning permission. So much hot air, then, I’ll believe it when I see it, etc. But a commenter at Pharyngula went and did a bit of digging, and found the charity’s annual report. And, oh dear, you’ve gotta laugh:
There’s a tiny graph on page seven showing, allegedly, the Appeal fund. They reckon they’ll need something over £3m, which is large by the standards of an individual but staggeringly low for serious TV production. They claim to have been promised £2m, although by who is not revealed - perhaps God promised them that much? - but they’ve received, at best, a quarter mil by the size of the “actual” bar. The real financial meat, however, is on page nine. They’ve received, by their own figures, a total of £2,310 over two years, £2,000 of which has come from the trustees of the fund. They’ve spent £1,999. They have £311 remaining. I have slightly more money than that in my current account at the moment.
You have personal data, including bank account details, on 25 million people which you need to transfer to another site. What do you do?
If you work at HM Revenue and Customs, you burn it onto some CDs and put it in the post. And when it doesn’t turn up, you repeat the exercise.
I keep alternating between hysterical cackling and total speechlessness.
And, as a number of bloggers I’ve surfed by have pointed out, this is the government that wants us to trust their ID cards scheme?
A third of [British] adults believe God watches over them, says a poll commissioned by a Christian charity.
Two in five adults say prayers and one in three believes that God is watching over them, a new poll reveals. Of the 20 million Britons aged over 18 who say they pray, 13 million do so at least once a month, 12 million every week and 9 million every day.
Apart from the fact that this is one of those irritating press stories about some survey or poll that tells you absolutely nothing of substance about the supposed research (methodology? sample size?), someone somewhere appears to have some serious problems with adding up. Is this just repeated from the press release or has the journalist managed to actively screw it up?
(Also, I’ve just spotted the date. It’s not something that got shoved up in a rush a few hours ago; it’s been there for a week.)
I imagine what they mean is that 13 million people pray at least once a month, of whom 12 million do it every week, of whom 9 million do it every day. Which makes it bad writing rather than bad arithmetic. Unless of course you’re one of those dreadful cynical people who would suggest that it’s done deliberately to inflate the figures…
1. Two pieces by Anthony Grafton: Future Reading: digitisation and its discontents is a substantial must-read article; and Adventures in Wonderland includes a selection of resources (h-t).
The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those without access or money. The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating… Soon, the present will become overwhelmingly accessible, but a great deal of older material may never coalesce into a single database… Though the distant past will be more available, in a technical sense, than ever before, once it is captured and preserved as a vast, disjointed mosaic it may recede ever more rapidly from our collective attention.
2. The Guardian and Observer Newspapers Archive (to 1975 at present) is up and running.
This is the first time a UK national newspaper’s print archive has been available through its website. Previously, the only way to explore newspaper archives was by laboriously searching newsprint pages, stored on microfilm and in bound copies. Our ambitious digitisation project involved scanning every page from microfilm, segmenting each page into article clippings and then making them searchable.
It’s a pay-for service, unfortunately, but there is a 24-hour free trial, and a variety of individual purchasing options. (The Guardian Unlimited archive, ie the archive of the online version of the newspaper since 1999, will continue to be available free of charge, according to the FAQ.)
Who’d have thought that family history could become so trendy? The latest government IT f**up is at the Family Records Centre in London.
For years, genealogists and family historians have pored over the massive green and maroon ledgers at the Family Records Centre in London, searching for details of more than 150 years of births, marriages and deaths. But there was anger or outright incredulity this weekend as professional and amateur researchers arrived to find most of the shelves bare.
There will never again be public access to the paper records, the index to where in the country all the births, marriages and deaths were registered, but - as so often with government IT projects - the timetable for the online version intended to replace them has collapsed. According to a spokesman for the Office for National Statistics, which is responsible for the General Records Office, “the present target is to have the online index available by mid-2009″.
I don’t suppose the ONS had allowed for family history becoming the middle-class high-profile hobby of choice, thanks to Who do you think you are? etc. Oops.
* The announcement of a Humanities Research Network, intended to provide “a comprehensive online resource for research in humanities, providing scholars with access to current work in their field and facilitating research and scholarship”. It’s starting with just three networks: Classic, English and American literature, Philosophy. Let’s hope History follows along soon…
* I posted a few weeks ago that the Arts and Humanities Data Service was losing most of its funding and was in danger of closing. Fortunately, however, King’s College London is establishing a new Centre for E-Research which will take over responsibility for the AHDS next year.
* The 19th-century British Newspaper Website has been launched: “a virtual library of nationally, regionally and locally important digitised British newspapers from 1800 to 1900″, which will be free for folks in UK HE/FE institutions.
The chief executive of the British Library warns of the potential damage that could be caused by cuts to its budget. (Those are the cuts resulting from overspending on the 2012 Olympics, including, of course, that dire logo.) Not just in terms of acquisitions and access to reading rooms; there is considerable emphasis on digital resources and access too:
If the suggested cuts to the nation’s greatest library go ahead, large parts of the UK’s digital output will be lost. Gaps will open in the intellectual record of the nation. As our global competitors forge further ahead in the digital world, the British Library will be marooned in the analogue era, ceasing to be relevant for future generations.
The proposed BL funding cuts have been well publicised. Meanwhile, the news that the Arts and Humanities Data Service (the UK’s central support and archiving service for humanities digital resources) is about to lose its funding has barely been noticed. It has been warned that we could rapidly go “from having an exceptionally strong system of national infrastructure support for ICT in Arts and Humanities research… [to] almost none at all.”
…the end of the AHDS may be decisive in the history of digital scholarship in the UK as this may be the end of national support. It is national support that has defined digital scholarship in the UK for many years and has helped the nation to become one of the world-leaders in the field. Without a national approach, the field may flounder or return to the dark days of scattered digital scholarship with little coherence or ambitions as a field.
I really should remember to watch the news on TV in the evening. OK, it did chuck it down all day yesterday, and the buses were pretty much screwed so I had to walk home (annoying), and there was this rather big pool of water where the road dips on the way home which I had to sort of tiptoe around (quite entertaining), but I was still a bit surprised when my mum phoned to check I was OK.
Oh.
That’s Sheffield and South Yorkshire a bit waterlogged there. And some poor kid drowned in the river perhaps a mile from my house - it looks as though four people have died in total. Pretty grim all round.
Sometimes I hate water.
(It may still be August, but the heatwave is a distant memory here in Yorkshire.)
So, an awful lot seems to have happened since my last proper post:
I don’t live in Aberystwyth any more. OK, it’s nice to be in a place that isn’t at the end of nowhere (there are real trains! that go often! and work!), and Sheffield has a lot going for it. But. I really miss all my old places. And the bilingual Welsh/English signs. And the sea.
I work in an open-plan office with several other people. This is more than a little strange, something I haven’t done for over a decade. But, you know, this is a Good Thing, not least because I have to get my flabby arse out of the house and go do stuff every day instead of lounging about on the sofa with my laptop pretending to work working. (Especially as I don’t as yet have a sofa. I just ordered it. I’ve moved from a semi-furnished flat to an unfurnished house. My credit card hurts real bad this month.)
I may not have a sofa, but I do have a new laptop: I got a shiny MacBook. And you know, now I do get why people go on about them so much. A PC will do the job, no problem. (You should see the kickass (and yet surprisingly cheap) piece of desktop kit I just ordered at work which someone else is paying for. Nice.) But, you know, a Mac is something else again. It gives pleasure; it’s fun to work with, and very stylish. To be more practical, it’s amazingly fast and I just love its keyboard, which feels different to anything else I’ve ever typed on. Among other cool things. (The only problem is that, being as it’s one of the white ones, it doesn’t half get grubby easily, dammit.)
What else?… Oh yes, the new job. Suffice to say, I’m thoroughly enjoying myself and it’s very different, if all a bit nerve-racking. Well, no doubt there’ll be more to say about that in the months to come.
(PS: I forgot this, but at some point while I was away this blog had its second birthday.)
Some of you will have heard of David Cameron’s A-list, part of his unstinting and useless selfless efforts to modernise his party, specifically in this case to get more women and ethnic minority candidates selected for safe Tory seats.
Some of you may also know that there will shortly be a by-election in the ultra-safe and ultra-Little-England Tory seat of Bromley & Chislehurst following the sudden death of the last incumbent Eric Forth (who was not exactly one of David’s buddies). David would like (but won’t force) the constituency party to select one of his A-listers. In truth, the best he can probably hope for is that they might select Forth’s widow, even though she’s not exactly one of his buddies either.
So Channel 4 is reporting the story from the constituency and interviews an old friend of the dead bloke, who comes out with the line (update: edited now I’ve been able to check the video clip, about 4 minutes in):
“I think they’ll be looking for a candidate who’s quite normal rather than a candidate who’s exotic”.
David really does have his work cut out with this bunch…
But this one seems timely and potentially interesting, at least, and they should have no shortage of material…
Plagiary - Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification.