Pedestrian power

Video of a driverless Nissan Leaf being tested in the UK. The stated aim is to test it on public roads if permission is granted.

Note how the car reacts when a pedestrian walks into the road. Changes the balance of power between motorist and pedestrian doesn't it? Cyclists too presumably.

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Chekhov on teaching

How can we undertake to bring up the young? In old days people were simpler and thought less, and so settled problems boldly. But we think too much, we are eaten up by logic. 

The more developed a man is, the more he reflects and gives himself up to subtleties, the more undecided and scrupulous he becomes, and the more timidity he shows in taking action. How much courage and self-confidence it needs, when one comes to look into it closely, to undertake to teach, to judge, to write a thick book.

Anton Chekhov – Home (short story published in 1887)

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Lost words

There are things we can’t say concisely and with sufficient emphasis because too many words have been softened by political familiarity.

A good word for authoritarian politics is one we could do with as a matter of some urgency. We have communist, Marxist, Stalinist, Maoist, fascist and one or two others but we already know them to be inadequate. They fail to capture the acute political danger of centralising all decisions. They fail to get behind the fluffy velvet glove.

Communist and Marxist have been shorn of their terrors by cartloads of fellow travellers infesting western politics and academia. Somehow, the human horror of killing innocent people by the millions has left no seriously indelible mark on our language. How convenient that is for modern central planners - but surely not a healthy situation for the rest of us.

As for Stalinist and Maoist I think the same problem applies. Many people of a certain age once knew self-professed Maoists and comfortable middle class faux radicals with Soviet sympathies. They were those for whom Stalin and Mao were no more than over-enthusiastic in their ruthless application of industrial scale murder.

As for fascist, it has evolved into little more than a term of abuse, although very often it is all we have. So we drift towards a kind of soft fascism because even our language has betrayal woven into its threadbare and endlessly ameliorative fabric.

What else can one say – without better words?

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BAe and Scottish independence

Is the Government leaning on BAe to threaten Scots with unemployment if they secede?

If so, let's reverse the Highland Clearances. I'll change my name to C U Jimmy and buy an Arctic sleeping bag. Portsmouth will never get independence and I'm about up to here with the dreary white man's way, where they pump house prices to win elections and turn your dwelling into the financial equivalent of an open prison.

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Chekhov on smoking



40 (packs) a day: http://news.malaysia.msn.com/photogallery.aspx?cp-documentid=4283455&page=2

“By the way, Yevgeny Petrovitch, I should like to ask you to speak to Seryozha. To-day, and the day before yesterday, I have noticed that he is smoking. When I began to expostulate with him, he put his fingers in his ears as usual, and sang loudly to drown my voice."

Yevgeny Petrovitch Bykovsky, the prosecutor of the circuit court, who had just come back from a session and was taking off his gloves in his study, looked at the governess as she made her report, and laughed. "Seryozha smoking... " he said, shrugging his shoulders. "I can picture the little cherub with a cigarette in his mouth! Why, how old is he?"

"Seven. You think it is not important, but at his age smoking is a bad and pernicious habit, and bad habits ought to be eradicated in the beginning."

"Perfectly true. And where does he get the tobacco?"

"He takes it from the drawer in your table."

"Yes? In that case, send him to me." When the governess had gone out, Bykovsky sat down in an arm-chair before his writing-table, shut his eyes, and fell to thinking. He pictured his Seryozha with a huge cigar, a yard long, in the midst of clouds of tobacco smoke, and this caricature made him smile; at the same time, the grave, troubled face of the governess called up memories of the long past, half-forgotten time when smoking aroused in his teachers and parents a strange, not quite intelligible horror.

It really was horror. Children were mercilessly flogged and expelled from school, and their lives were made a misery on account of smoking, though not a single teacher or father knew exactly what was the harm or sinfulness of smoking. Even very intelligent people did not scruple to wage war on a vice which they did not understand.

Yevgeny Petrovitch remembered the head-master of the high school, a very cultured and good-natured old man, who was so appalled when he found a high-school boy with a cigarette in his mouth that he turned pale, immediately summoned an emergency committee of the teachers, and sentenced the sinner to expulsion.

This was probably a law of social life: the less an evil was understood, the more fiercely and coarsely it was attacked.

Anton Chekhov – Home (short story published in 1887)

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Jon Holmes and Waitrose

Jon Holmes is a writer, comedian and broadcaster who features on Radio 4's Now Show. This week he was being hilarious about people who shop at Waitrose (spoilt middle-class focaccia-fanciers etc - 8 minutes into this episode).

Jon Holmes lives in Canterbury, Kent, where he went to university.

His nearest Waitrose branch is:

The average asking price for a semi-detached house in Birmingham B28 (the location of my nearest Waitrose) is £205,431 (more than mine is worth, I'm afraid). In Canterbury it's £253,333.

There is a point, is there not, when an edgy comedian becomes part of the class he satirises. It used to be that they then started writing restaurant sketches, since presumably they'd given up cooking for themselves. We can only hope that it doesn't go so far with Jon. Equally, we hope that he's lost some of his rough Warwickshire ways* and now knows what furniture is for.

Anyone seen him down the flavoured olive oil aisle recently?

* "Despite his numerous awards Holmes has been sacked from a plethora of stations including Xfm, where he allegedly defecated into fellow presenter Dermot O'Leary's desk drawer live on air.." http://www.suchsmallportions.com/person/jon-holmes

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Intelligence and smarties

Let’s concoct a new theory of intelligence. It’s about time we had a new one because the old version looks as flaky as a Lib Dem policy. Just take a look at current energy policies if you don’t believe me - Lib Dems are in favour.

Right ho - to rectify this lamentable situation I’ve spent fifteen precious minutes dreaming up the basic building block of intelligent awareness called... wait for it...

The smartie.

It’s not an original use of the word, but what do you expect for fifteen minutes? A workable energy policy?... Hmm, bad example... anyway, here is the smartie theory in all its conceptual glory.

In essence, the more smarties you have and the wider your range of smarties, the smarter you are - in a genial kind of way because I think a nod to Santayana is somehow appropriate for smarties. If you want to know why, you’ll have to read him and acquire a whole shed-load of smarties.

So throughout daily life we have the option of acquiring more smarties - vitamins of the mind. Smarties come in numerous colours, shapes, flavours, sizes, sweetness, price and brands so those who collect only one flavour or those who focus on brand are not as smart as those who collect lots of different smarties. Especially the home made smarties, of which smartie theory itself is just one example!

For example, Nick Clegg only collects Nick Clegg and EU smarties, which makes him smart on these subjects only. He knows how the EU is likely to benefit Nick Clegg and virtually nothing else. There are no Lib Dem smarties by the way.

Those eccentrics who love nuances and breadth of vision also love all kinds of smarties and collect loads of them. This gives us the Smartie Rich or SR quotient – a much needed antidote to IQ. So a person with a high SR is smarter than Nick Clegg which we now know isn’t saying much but it’s progress of a kind. Progress Nick knows nothing about of course.

The elite classes only collect elite smarties, a narrow range of all the smarties on offer. So they never become smart - because they can’t. Prince Charles is a good example. In his position, with all that travel and cultural contact he should have a huge SR, but his social position narrows the possibilities before he even gets to choose. He only likes green smarties anyway.

Prince George will have the same problem – except he won’t even know because he won’t have a sufficiently wide range of smarties to tell him it’s a problem.

So it is with the political elite who only collect the smarties offered to them by lobbyists, flunkies, and smartie advisers who are in exactly the same smartie-delimted boat.

Smartie collecting is an essentially serendipitous activity driven by the sheer joy of discovery and the substantially lesser joy of changing your mind occasionally.

Smarties are usually minor discoveries such as nuances, aspects alternative emphases or poetic insights, but they are all grist to the smartie mill and raise one’s SR to quite dizzying heights of pure fancy.

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