Majority 'back selective schools'

As a relatively successful product of the old, selective system of British secondary schooling, I used to toe the Labour party line on the virtues of comprehensive education. I wised up after I arrived in the USA. After seeing the practical results (including the mess that US public education has become), I can’t say I’m surprised to read that “More than three-quarters of people believe bright children would do better if taught separately, a poll suggests.” I don’t think anyone – even the most devout social democrats – ever believed that this idea was false; the difference is that now people seem willing to admit that bright kids ought to have the opportunity to do better. Elitist? Maybe so – but meritocracy certainly seems preferable to plutocracy….

This time last year

This time last year, I had a sidebar feature on my blog that displayed the articles from a year before, so in addition to speculating about major snowstorms that weren’t I was able to look back to New Year 2005. Revisiting my blogging from December 2005 and January 2006, I see that much of it involves travel – to SeeBeyond in LA, to STK in Colorado, to various places in India and the Czech Republic.
Over the last few days, I re-read a lot of those pieces, and then spent a while wondering whether – and how! – to summarize 2006. So many changes, after so long (too long?!) in one groove. New role. New job. New company. New city. New lifestyle. New timezone. New friends. Flexing new muscles (metaphorically and physically).
And loss. Sure. But less than expected. One interesting thought: as we were clearing out 700+ books (in preparation for selling the house), I came across a volume of English landscape photography, given to me by my colleagues at CMC in Hemel Hempstead in 1981 when I left to relocate to the USA (“just for a few years!”). Inside there was a card with 40 or 50 names from the dim, distant past. I don’t think I stayed in contact with any of them after I moved. Compare that with today: I regularly exchange email with people all over the world that I’ve known for years. I’ve reconnected with people I knew 30 or 40 years ago. And so even though life is naturally episodic, the episodes are perhaps less disconnected than they were in years gone by. (Or maybe it’s just age, or indolence, or the pace of life: my mother’s generation seems relatively adept at maintaining webs of friendship spreading across space and time.)
Regrets? Any impulse to point fingers? Well, yes, but not strongly, because I’m so much happier in my new groove, and if it were not for the incompetence of a few Sun executives (now mostly ex-Sun) I’d probably still be there. So perhaps I should thank XXX for fscking things so royally, and YYY for not firing his sorry ass until it was too late. (I guess I feel about the StorageTek acquisition a bit like many people feel about the invasion of Iraq: I’d never have supported it if I’d known how badly the administration would screw it up.)
Anyway, I’m now working for a (potential) customer for the kinds of products that Sun offers. I have to say that it’s… breathtaking to realize the irrelevance of many of the things that seemed important when I was at Sun. Ah, well. It’s also good to recognize the many valuable lessons I learned there that I can apply my new role, and to thank the wise men and women from whom I learned them. (Some are still at Sun, but most have also moved on.)
Enough of this rambling: I have work to do. One challenge I face: what to do with all my CDs. It’s a curious practical and ethical dilemma. I have hundreds of CDs that I’ve ripped into iTunes, and I never need to touch the physical CDs again. But they’re bulky to store, with jewel cases, booklets, and various kinds of fancy packaging. What should I do? I can’t give them away or sell them; I’m a strong believer in not stealing from artists. Physically destroying them feels wrong in so many ways. I wish there were some really efficient way to store just the CDs themselves (perhaps on spindles, like the way they sell blank CD-Rs). And of course I don’t have time to deal with any of this; I’ll be heading back to Seattle tomorrow.
‘Tis a puzzlement….

Random 10

I haven’t done a Random 10 for quite a while, so here’s the first of the New Year. iTunes delivered a fairly conventional list this time, including several that are hard not to sing along with. (Specifically, those by Janis, Bruce, Kirsty, Paula, and Love.)

  • “Life of Surprises” by Prefab Sprout (from A Life of Surprises) [How apposite for the last 12 months of my life!]
  • “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” by Paula Cole (from This Fire)
  • “Trip And Glide” by Love & Rockets (from Hot Trip To Heaven)
  • “Gather Round” by Love (from Out There)
  • “Me And Bobby McGee” by Janis Joplin (from 18 Essential Songs)
  • “We Never Change” by Coldplay (from Parachutes)
  • “Dancing In The Dark” by Bruce Springsteen (from Greatest Hits)
  • “Mean Mr. Mustard” by The Beatles (from Abbey Road)
  • “You Don’t Even Know Me” by Al Stewart (from Orange)
  • “He’s On The Beach” by Kirsty MacColl (from Galore)

Rhinovirus and "Slings and Arrows"

The lack of recent blog entries is due to a small, unwelcome visitor: a pesky rhinovirus* which laid me low for several days, and still makes my sinuses feel as if they’re full of glue. So I’ve spent most of my time sleeping, blowing my nose, and watching TV (in that order). And as for TV… well, before la grippe struck, I visited some friends in Andover, and they introduced me to the Canadian series Slings and Arrows. I was hooked. We picked up the DVDs for Season 1 and Season 2 yesterday, and watched the first three episodes back-to-back. Absolutely brilliant.
—
* When I started typing this entry, I assumed – incorrectly – that all examples of the common cold were caused by rhinoviruses. However according to Wikipedia: “The common cold is caused by numerous viruses (mainly rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, and also certain echoviruses, paramyxoviruses, and coxsackieviruses) infecting the upper respiratory system.” So who knows what got into my nasopharynx this time?

"You wait around for a bus, and then a whole lot turn up at once…"

Regular readers will have been following my transition from the Greater Boston area to Seattle, and settling in to my apartment. We’ve sold the house, and it’s time for the next bit of downsizing. I’m going to ship most of my books to Seattle (especially my philosophy library), but one thing has to go: the model bus collection. It consists of about 150 replicas of British buses, all to 1/76 scale, mostly manufactured by EFE and OOC. You can see them here. The majority are models of London Transport and London Country buses, but there’s plenty of variety, and quite a few rareties. All are unboxed.
some of my buses
Now, what am I going to do? I don’t have time to eBay them (difficult when unboxed), nor to do any elaborate cataloguing, packaging and shipping. I doubt there are many collectors in the New England area. All the same, I’d hate to just dump them in the trash. What a waste – and they’re probably worth a few bob; they certainly cost me several $K.
Any suggestions?
P.S. I’ve also got this nice, clean Subaru Legacy GT that I need to sell. 2.5 litre turbo, 250 HP, five speed automatic, 13,500 miles, loads of fun. Answers to the name of DARWIN….

Brian Cathcart on my mother

The writer Brian Cathcart recently wrote a short priece for the New Statesman entitled A history lesson. It begins:

Not many authors publish a book at the age of 90, and fewer still do so when they are already halfway through another book. Can there be more than one in that position, and who is also virtually blind?

The author he’s talking about is my mother, Lorna Arnold (about whom Alec and I recently blogged). The first book to which he’s referring is Britain, Australia and the Bomb: The Nuclear Tests and Their Aftermath, which is the new (and substantially expanded) edition of her classic book about the British A-bomb tests in Australia. And “another book” is the volume of memoirs that all of her friends (and I too) have been urging her to write for many years.
Lorna Arnold Britain, Australia and the Bomb
Occasionally people will ask me what I plan to do when I retire. I have always replied that I don’t understand the question: what is this “retirement” of which they speak. Perhaps my mother’s example explains my attitude….

And they wonder why some of us think organized religion is cuckoo…..

David Farley has a piece in Slate entitled Who stole Jesus’ foreskin?. OK, we can all enjoy a chuckle about medieval superstition, and holy relics, and stuff like that. But the sophisticated types in the Catholic hierarchy would never take such things seriously, would they? But in 1900…

Facing increasing criticism after the “rediscovery” of a holy foreskin in France, the Vatican decreed that anyone who wrote about or spoke the name of the holy foreskin would face excommunication. And 54 years later, when a monk wanted to include Calcata in a pilgrimage tour guide, Vatican officials didn’t just reject the proposal (after much debate). They upped the punishment: Now, anyone uttering its name would face the harshest form of excommunication—”infamous and to be avoided”—even as they concluded that Calcata’s holy foreskin was more legit than other claimants’.

It’s pure Monty Python, isn’t it? (And for the record, Farley believes that the Pope arranged for the “holy foreskin” to be stolen. It makes as much sense as the rest of this stuff.)

"Ask the pilot" on the "gels, aerosols and liquids" idiocy

From the 2006 retrospective edition of Salon’s excellent column Ask the pilot:

Speaking of things that never happened, how could we forget last summer’s liquid-bomb terror scare. In case you were living on Neptune at the time and missed the news, British police broke up an alleged London-based scheme to bring down several U.S. airliners using hard-to-detect liquid explosives. The public continues to believe that authorities rushed in and saved thousands of lives in the nick of time. Quite the contrary. What makes the story so special is how much of an overblown ruse the whole thing was, and just how preposterous our reaction to it has been. The fact that both alleged ringleaders of the plot have been released without charge has gone scarcely noticed by the press. Meanwhile, despite assertions by experts that the types of bombs alleged in the scheme are all but impossible to brew, millions of travelers remain subject to absurd prohibitions of liquids, gels and aerosols from their carry-on bags.

And the result: the insane, chaotic scene from Heathrow that I blogged about recently. But to fix this, some politician somewhere is going to have to violate the most important taboo in politics: Never Admit That You Made A Mistake. Apparently it is more important to be consistent than to be right. (Probably because in this complex world, nobody can actually tell if you’re right, but any idiot can tell if you’re consistent. Dumbed-down political discourse. Good grief….)
P.S. Did you know that the plot ringleaders had been released? I certainly missed it….