This week’s usual rag-bag of oddities which have crossed my path in the last 7 days or so …
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If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you first must invent the Universe.
[Carl Sagan]
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I like your Christ. I don’t like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.
[Mohandas Gandhi]
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Journalists write to support democracy, sustain truth, salute justice, justify expenses, see the world and make a living, but to satisfactorily do any of these things you have to have readers. Fairness and accuracy are of course profoundly important. Without them, you aren’t in journalism proper: you are playing some other game. But above all, you have to be read, or you aren’t in journalism at all.
[Tim Radford at Guardian Science Blog]
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Trivial is a favourite insult administered by scholars. But even they became interested in their subject in the first place because they were attracted by something gleaming, flashy and – yes, trivial.
[Tim Radford at Guardian Science Blog]
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The Guardian used to have a special Muzzled Piranha Award, a kind of Oscar of incompetence, handed to an industrial relations reporter who warned the world that the Trades Union Congress wildcats were lurking in the undergrowth, ready to dart out like piranhas, unless they were muzzled. George Orwell reports on the case of an MP who claimed that the jackbooted fascist octopus had sung its swansong.
[Tim Radford at Guardian Science Blog]
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3 July 1679. Sending a piece of Venison to Mr. Pepys Sec: of the Admiralty, still a Prisoner, I went & dined with him.
[Guy de la Bédoyère; The Diary of John Evelyn]
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26 May 1703. This dyed Mr. Sam: Pepys, a very worthy, Industrious & curious person, none in England exceeding him in the Knowledge of the Navy, in which he had passed thro all the most Considerable Offices, Clerk of the Acts, & Secretary to the Admiralty, all which he performed with greate Integrity: when K: James the 2d went out of England he layed down his Office, & would serve no more: But withdrawing himselfe from all publique Affairs, lived at Clapham with his partner (formerly his Cleark) Mr. Hewer, in a very noble House & sweete place, where he injoyned the fruit of his labours in geate prosperity, was universaly beloved, Hospitable, Generous, Learned in many things, skill ‘d in Musick, a very greate Cherisher of Learned men, of whom he had the Conversation. His Library & other Collections of Curiositys was one of the most Considerable; The models of Ships especialy &c. […] Mr. Pepys had ben for neere 40 years, so my particular Friend, that he now sent me Compleat Mourning: desiring me to be one to hold up the Pall, at his magnificent Obsequies; but my present Indisposition, hindred me from doing him this last Office:…
[Guy de la Bédoyère; The Diary of John Evelyn]
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For more than forty Cold-War years the United Kingdom played the role, in the words of the eminent investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, of America’s Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier.
[Nick Catford; Cold War Bunkers]
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Spring Quarry near Corsham in Wiltshire became the Central Government War Headquarters – the alternate seat of government to which the Great and the Good would decamp in the event of a nuclear war. The very existence of the site was denied by the Government for decades. When its secrets were finally revealed in December 2005 it proved to be a grave disappointment. Starved of cash by successive administrations, its development had been halting and, despite its enormous size, the Spring Quarry site is bathed in a gloomy aura of half-hearted compromise.
[Nick Catford; Cold War Bunkers]
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Apropos this last quote, when you start reading about the UK’s WWII bunkers and the like (of which Corsham is a prime example) you seriously wonder how the country achieved anything, let along managed to win the war. But then reading Sam Pepys’s diaries and letters things were much the same in the 17th century – ministerial obfuscation at every turn and a serious lack of funding. Oh, what do you mean? It isn’t any better now? Surely not!
