The magnitude 9 earthquake that struck Japan on 11 March was one of the five most powerful shocks recorded; so powerful that it lowered the coastline by a metre and nudged Japan two metres closer to the United States.
[Jonathan Watts, “Fukushima disaster: it’s not over yet”, Guardian, 9 September 2011, online here]
Not a lot in the way of quotes this week, although those that follow are relatively chunky, as we’ve spent 4 days over the weekend running an international literary conference (more of which anon, I hope).
I believe Tony Blair is an out-and-out rascal, terminally untrustworthy and close to being unhinged. I said from the start that there was something wrong in his head, and each passing year convinces me more strongly that this man is a pathological confidence-trickster. To the extent that he ever believes what he says, he is delusional. To the extent that he does not, he is an actor whose first invention – himself – has been his only interesting role.
[Matthew Parris, The Times, March 2006; quoted in Oliver James, Affluenza]
Tea Pigs uses only whole leaf teas, whole herbs, whole berries and whole flowers. No dust in sight. Served in biodegradable tea temples.
[https://www.teapigs.co.uk/]
I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.
[William Blake, Politicians and Politics]
So there you are … politics diluted with tea. What could be more British?!
There’s a thought-provoking post from a couple of days ago by Peter Osborne on the Daily Telegraph blogs site under the title “The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom“.
He takes our revered leaders — politicians and businessmen alike — to task for being hypocritical over the recent looting when they have equally been found with their hands in the petty cash box. As the good book says “Let those who are without sin cast the first stone”.
Worth a read.
Some odd bedfellows this week …
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
[Robert Louis Stephenson]
Your car is Japanese. Your vodka is Russian. Your pizza is Italian. Your kebab is Turkish. Your democracy is Greek. Your coffee is Brazilian. Your movies are American. Your tea is Tamil. Your shirt is Indian. Your oil is Saudi Arabian. Your electronics are Chinese. Your numbers are Arabic, your letters Latin. And you complain that your neighbour is an immigrant? Pull yourself together!
[Seen on Facebook]
‘chav’ (vogue label of 2004, originally a traveller’s term of address or endearment, from a French nickname for a young fox), who represents an imagined social grouping, a troublesome, truculent, feckless, shameless underclass delighting in petty criminality and conspicuous consumption (of, inter alia, illicit substances, electronic stimuli, pimped technology and ‘bling’).
[Tony Thorne, Jolly Wicked, Actually]
An eye for an eye makes the world go blind. A tooth for a tooth gums up everything!
[Thoughts of Angel]
Sex was an expression of friendship: in Africa it was like holding hands … It was friendly and fun. There was no coercion. It was offered willingly.
[Paul Theroux quoted in Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn]
I had a friend at university who used to propound this latter theory that sex was (and should be seen as) not necessarily more than an expression of sincere friendship and that why should one not have sex with ones friends just as one might have a beer with them. Not sure he ever managed to put it much into practice though.
This week, a few words of wisdom from some Americans …
Any social organization does well enough if it isn’t rigid. The framework doesn’t matter as long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It is almost nothing — except when it is a straitjacket. It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of zeros.
[Robert A Heinlein, Glory Road]
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.
[Thomas Jefferson]
Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.
[Scott Adams]
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
[Thomas Edison]
I have always believed that I was slightly saner than most people. Then again, most insane people think this.
[Truman Capote]
About a week ago David Marsh wrote a brilliant article in the Guardian about the peculiar torture of Railspeak, that surpassingly odd distortion of English perpetrated by train companies:
Railspeak is a language with a unique syntax and vocabulary — characterised by, for example, the mandatory use of auxiliary verbs (“we do apologise”), the random deployment of redundant adjectives (“station stop”, “personal belongings”) and the selection of inappropriate prepositions (“journey time into London Paddington is approximately 25 minutes”).
Trains never leave, but “depart”, never reach their destination, but “terminate”, and are frequently delayed by mysterious “incidents”. Rail catering, meanwhile, has been transformed from a music hall joke (British Rail sandwiches) to a surreal world of its own, offering among other treats “teas, coffees, hot chocolates [sic] …” (Has anyone tested this by asking how many varieties of hot chocolate are, in fact, available? To enjoy, perhaps, while reading the safety information leaflet in braille?)
…
Meanwhile, someone should tell the announcer at Waterloo station that the ever-lengthening list of things we can’t do — smoke, run, cycle, skateboard, find a rubbish bin, find a seat — does not, so far, extend to playing boules or yodelling. Is this an oversight?
Customers requiring enhumoration into their Monday will find the article in the vestibule at the end of the post. Here.
So here’s this week’s cornucopia of quotations. There’s a philosophy PhD in this lot somewhere!
A clean house is the sign of a broken computer.
[Unknown]
At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
[Rose Macaulay]
A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.
[Robert Frost]
The human body can remain nude and uncovered and preserve intact its splendour and its beauty … Nakedness as such is not to be equated with physical shamelessness … Immodesty is present only when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person … The human body is not in itself shameful … Shamelessness (just like shame and modesty) is a function of the interior of a person.
[Pope John Paul II, The Theology of the Body]
The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.
[Jean Cocteau]
The best things in life aren’t things.
[Unknown]
Those who are at ease with themselves […] want to undermine authority rather than exercise it.
[Prof. Paul Delany]
[Tony] Blair has […] told us, “Hand on my heart, I did what I thought was right”. If a dry-cleaner said this after ruining our jacket, we would not be pleased with the explanation. Politicians are different: don’t look at any unfortunate results, they say, just admire my generous motives.
[Prof. Paul Delany]
A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason, and the real reason.
[Financier JP Morgan]
One of the basic human rights is to make fun of other people, whoever they are.
[Anthony Powell quoted in John Russell, Reading Russell: Essays 1941 to 1988]
If you don’t like our sense of humour, please tell us so we can laugh at you.
[Unknown]
Jeana over at MySexProfessor writes an incisive post about why it is more important that we know about the religious lives of public figures than their sex lives — albeit the article is built on the words of one of my hate figures, Richard Dawkins. It isn’t that I disagree with the sentiments behind much of what Dawkins says (I don’t), but the bigoted and intransigent way in which he says it — he is just as fundamentalist as any of the religious believers against whom he rails.
As so often others have said what I think so much better than I can, so here are a couple of seminal extracts.
[O]ur society has so many hang-ups about sex that we’re practically responsible for creating an environment in which any sexual expression could potentially be deviant […] even fairly innocuous acts (which one could argue, taking pictures of one’s genitals counts as) are made out to be of huge significance because so many people are hung up on the idea that ANY sexual expression outside the norm is automatically inappropriate or gross or bad.
…
Dawkins asserts that it does matter what a public figure’s religious beliefs are, since those beliefs, far more than their sexual acts, may determine how they pursue public policy. He gives these examples: “[…] George Bush has publicly boasted that God told him to invade Iraq […] To push to an extreme, who would deny Congress’s right to ask whether a candidate for Secretary of Health is a Christian Scientist or a Jehovah’s Witness? Or take a Christian sect that fervently desires the Second Coming of Christ, and believes the key Revelation prophecies cannot be fulfilled without a Middle East Armageddon. Would you wish the nuclear button to be made available to a follower of such a creed?” This is scary stuff.
…
[W]e must grant people the dignity of privately pursuing things that oppose the sexual mainstream.** Just because a politician likes unconventional sex doesn’t mean they’re going to try to force it on everyone through legislation. Unfortunately […] politicians have done much to make anything that deviates from heterosexual monogamous reproductive sex a crime.
** And not just the sexual mainstream. People must have the right to deviate from and oppose mainstream thought and opinion on anything. For that is how opinions are changed, new ideas formed and progress made. But this doesn’t give anyone the right to force or attempt to force (violently or otherwise) their opinions on others.
As one of those filial duties I pay for my mother’s subscription to BBC Wildlife magazine, and once she’s read it my mother passes the copies to me. So it was that last evening I was reading the May 2011 issue and came across this amazing report of foxes using the earth’s magnetic field. I hope I might be forgiven for reproducing the short news item here as it doesn’t otherwise appear to be online.
Magnetic foxes
Scientists reveal the otherworldly talents of red foxes.
The hunting skills of the red fox Vulpes vulpes are out of this world — literally. According to new work, this hunter taps into the cosmos to pinpoint prey.
The fox feeds mostly on small mammals such as mice and voles, and has a clever way of going about it. It often performs what is called mousing — leaping high into the air in an arc and landing on unsuspecting prey from above. Remarkably, it can pull this off in 1m-high grass (or, in winter, snow of that depth). It’s assumed that, under these conditions, the fox relies solely on hearing to locate its quarry.
But when a team led by Hynek Burda, from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, scrutinised the hunting habits of wild foxes at various locations in the Czech Republic, they noted a peculiar trend: hunters tended to catch dinner most often when they were facing north. This was especially true if their prey was snuggled under vegetation or snow – the foxes then had a 75 per cent hit rate with north-facing strikes. Attacks in all other directions were mostly futile.
What’s so special about looking north? The researchers believe that the foxes use the Earth’s magnetic field to home in on prey.
Some other mammals, and also birds, are known to sense magnetic north — and some are thought to actually see it, when looking northward, as a bright (or dark) patch in their field of vision — a little like a sunspot in a camera lens — due to special receptors in their eyes. If foxes have this ability, they could use its fixed position to gauge their distance to prey.
Think of it as a circle of light from a headlamp aimed, say, 1m in front of your feet. No matter where you go, the circle is always 1m ahead. Thus, a northward-facing fox that has located prey with its hearing needs only to creep forward until that location is within the circle of light. At that point, it knows it’s exactly 1m away. All that’s left to do is pounce.
It’s the first evidence of an animal using the Earth’s magnetic field as a hunting tool.
Animal Magnetism
» This is the first case of an animal using the Earth’s magnetic field to judge distance rather than direction.
» Except for jump direction, no other factor — from an animal’s age/sex to the season, wind direction or time of day — affected the observed pattern.
» Animals that sense magnetic north probably also sense magnetic south to a degree. Indeed, 60 per cent of fruitful attacks that were not northward faced due south. Overall, 90 per cent were along the north-south axis.
» Cattle and deer tend to line up along the north-south axis – except near high-voltage power lines that disrupt the field.
» When foxes could see their prey they had success in all directions.