Flight Entertainment, by JD

JD recalls fun aboard a Spanish jet...


Everybody who has travelled will have a tale or two about the weird and wonderful things that happen. Amusing tales, scary tales, strange tales…..

In over thirty years of travelling and probably 1000+ flights I should have kept a log of all the things that have helped make the journeys interesting and entertaining; missed connections, delays, ‘firm’ landings, turbulence, lightning strikes (three so far), scared passengers as well as mad cabin crew.

(If you are wondering how I could reach 1000 it’s because I live nowhere near London which means I have to take two planes to go anywhere and two more to return. And when I have needed to make a day trip to, for example, Zurich or Frankfurt it can mean four flights in one day, two there and two back, So they quickly mount up.)

Almost all of my travelling has been work related. A job in Madrid involved periodic short viits to Cairo. On one of these visits, after boarding and settling down, I then wandered along the cabin to ask the stewardess (am I still allowed to say stewardess?) for an aspirin or something for my hangover and we had a chit chat about nothing in particular, as you do.

Back to my seat and it was seat belt, safety routine and away we go. Then it was drinks, duty free trolley, meal, wine, more wine, coffee, brandy and later it was blinds down, dim the lights and time for the in-flight movie. I am not much of a movie fan so I relax into my usual semi-comatose tranquility with only half an eye on the screen.

And then – Ding!

“Cabin crew; twenty minutes to landing.”

Oh. Shurely shome mishtake. I wasn’t really paying attention but it seemed to me that there was about half an hour left before the end of the film. I must have misheard but then the bustle began. Cabin lights on again, clearing away empty glasses, checking overhead lockers, seat belts fastened etc, the usual. The film was switched off and then we landed.

Well, that was a new one. Iberia always keep you on your toes, you never know what to expect.

Three or four days later, having done whatever it was I was in Cairo for, it was time to return to Madrid. Lo and behold it was the same crew and the stewardess recognised me. “Hola de nuevo, JD, como estas?” and we had a chat and I asked her, “Will we see the end of the in-flight movie this time?” She laughed and said, “Don’t worry, no problem. Now we are better organised.”

So I settled down and as above; take off, drinks, duty free trolley, meal. wine, more wine, coffee, brandy. In flight movie time once more and again I lapse into dozy contentment, half an eye on the screen and mind in neutral.

And then………

The film snapped or the projector broke down or something and we ended up with a blank screen (this was in the olden days before digital video etc). The crew and the other passengers must have been dozing too because I don’t think anybody noticed. And we carried on cruising home, ‘entertainment’ free in blissful quietude, until we landed in Madrid and returned to the hurry-up of normal life.

The in-flight wines were better and more reliable than the in-flight movies. Iberia have got their priorities right, they know what is important to their passengers.

In case you think I am being unfair and critical of Iberia, I am not. They are one of my favourite airlines. Unlike the Barely Average competition, they employ real humans and their First Class really is first class.

Wherever and whenever you are travelling can I wish you all ‘buen viaje’.
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The above piece first appeared -with visual supplements - on Nourishing Obscurity here.

Can you have ethics without some form of religion?

I think not. 

Ethics have to have a basis. You can't derive an "ought" from an "is" - unless you have a philosophy that combines both - e.g. God the Creator who is also the Lawgiver. 

Without that, ethics is merely a study of moral attitudes without any hortative or normative force. Or a matter of logical consequences - "if you believe x and wish to be consistent, then you should do y". For example I asked a class whether eating animals was cruel and they all said yes, but balked at the idea of not eating meat at lunch. 

One answer would be simply to change one's principles to make them consistent with one's desires. Although possibly, being consistent could also be seen as an optional principle.

A moral code may be desirable, but that is not enough for it to be independent of human wishes or inclinations. Codes may differ sharply, with no way to determine which is correct or superior: for example, how does one adjudicate between cannibals and vegans?

The Beast From The East, by Wiggia

I had to take the wife shopping yesterday, I have to take the wife shopping anyway as she no longer can drive, and we went to the local Sainsbury's.

All went well until I was requested to fetch a loaf: what I saw as I turned into the bread sales area was a scene from East Germany, when all the shelves were permanently empty in the food stores. Amazingly with only a couple of days left of the effects of the “beast from the east”, shoppers were still plundering the bread and milk sections.

I had taken No1 shopping on Monday morning as usual and it was fairly quiet but by the time we left the car park was full as the public piled in to purchase anything that would stave off death by starvation. The till operator said the weekend had been unbelievable with the public buying multiples of everything from bottled water to fruit and veg and they had run out of most staples.

I have no idea how the public react to a weather warning on the rest of the continent but we have made an art form of the whole thing, from the weather reports in the MSM threatening Armageddon with threats of ten foot snow drifts, ice flooding and gales everywhere, trains stopped running before any snow had fallen in the south, schools shut everywhere on the principal that NO one would be able to get in and health and safety prevailed - prevailed to such an extent that the same schoolkids told to stay at home for safety reasons were then seen on national news jumping off steep hills on unlikely homemade sledges.

The road outside my house had the good fortune to have a snow clearer come through in the night, but I discovered in the morning that the snow clearer in ridding the road of snow had thrown it all on the pavement, meaning pedestrians had to walk in the road !

I can remember a similar cold spell - it was worse - back in the early eighties, when a local firm in Essex cornered the market in moon boots, bringing in on a barge up the river Blackwater in Essex thousands of these boots from Holland; I thought afterwards there must be cupboards everywhere stuffed with these boots that will never see the light of day again. There is no doubt that an impending weather “event” can be a great sales promotion.

A similar thing happened in the Great Storm when trees were down all over the place: my supplier told me he had been inundated with people wanting to buy chainsaws as tree surgeons could not cope with the work offered, and he had sold out twice and Stihl were trying to get extra supplies in from Germany.

Again I thought that there would be thousands of redundant chainsaws on eBay soon after, as those that had purchased them would have no further use, but no it never happened and again there must be thousands of hardly used chainsaws rusting in sheds all over the country. So no doubt now moldy bread and rancid milk is already being dumped along with limp lettuce and off veg, all will be forgotten until the next beast from the east or wherever it may come from.

Is Our Political Class Incompetent?

I watched the first half of BBC's Question Time on catch-up, and there was the old, dangerously avuncular Ken Clarke explaining how those who voted Leave hadn't considered all the - oh, so complicated - implications.

Sadly, no-one there thought to take him up on the question of contractual due diligence. For after Parliament voted to end the UK as a free country - as Tony Benn pointed out - in 1993, Ken Clarke, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, boasted that he hadn't read the Maastricht Treaty.

He was not alone: Douglas Hurd, then Foreign Secretary, said (Maastricht signing, 7 February 1992) "'Now we've signed it – we had better read it!'"

What would any commercial business do with a contracts manager who waved through agreements without even looking at them?

So I'm not inclined to take seriously any waffle from the old Bilderbergian about knowing exactly how everything will pan out before making a decision.

And no - not incompetent, or at least. not merely incompetent: arrogant, antidemocratic and treacherous.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Arvo Pärt, by JD

This evening (Friday) on BBC4 is a programme called "The Magic of Minimalism" about the American composers Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and La Monte Young.
https://digiguide.tv/programme/Documentary/Tones-Drones-and-Arpeggios-The-Magic-of-Minimalism/1237248/

I shall probably watch it, of course, but Charles Hazlewood's description of them as 'great composers' is stretching it a bit. Their music is interesting but eventually becomes monotonous.

It would be a more interesting programme if he were to include the genuinely great 'minimalist' composers of the 20th century, the late Sir John Tavener and especially the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt

“I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements – with one voice, two voices. I build with primitive materials – with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells and that is why I call it tintinnabulation”- Arvo Pärt
http://www.good-music-guide.com/reviews/071_arvo_part.htm

Herewith a selection of Tintinnabulation plus a rather quirky interview of Arvo Pärt by Björk.

The US gun debate - some additional facts

The recent mass shooting in a Florida school has seized the imagination, since it combines elements of fear, unpredictability and helplessness.  But emotional reactions have a way of skewing perceptions of overall reality. For example, the thought of an airplane crash has a similar terrifying effect, even though commercial passenger flight is, statistically, the safest mode of travel.

Without at all wishing to discount the horror of those killings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I offer a few facts that might make us consider related issues more deeply:

In most countries, suicide is a bigger threat than homicide

"In 2013, 33,636 persons died from firearm injuries in the United States [...] The two major component causes of firearm injury deaths in 2013 were suicide (63.0%) and homicide (33.3%)." (1)

In most large and advanced countries, suicide is significantly more likely than murder or manslaughter - 2 1/2 times more in the US, 12 times more in Germany. (2)

Some other advanced and developing countries have a worse intentional death rate than the USA

Taking the overall rate of intentional death (i.e. homicides and suicides together), the US is less plagued than Finland, Japan and China, to name but a few. (2)

In the USA, black people are, proportionately to their numbers, far more likely than whites to be victims of homicide

Despite representing only 12.6% of the US population (3) ... "Of the 13,455 cases from last year [i.e. 2015] in which the FBI listed a victim's racial information, 7,039 victims – or 52.3 percent – were black." (4)

A number of other large countries have a worse murder rate than the US

The intentional homicide rate is some 5 times higher in the USA than in the UK (5), but the rate in the US [4.88 per 100,000 inhabitants] - terrible though it is - puts it 94th in the list by country. Large countries [see (6) for population figures] that have a higher homicide rate include (e.g.) Brazil (pop: 209m), Mexico (129m), Russia (144m) and the Philippines (105m).

Mass gun slayings in the US are a small percentage of overall firearm homicides

In 2015, mass shootings accounted for less than 4% of total US homicides by firearm. (7)

Things used to be far worse, in the Middle Ages

The murder rate in the university town of Oxford, England, in the 1340s is estimated to have been 110 per 100,000 inhabitants (8) - slightly worse than the most violent country today (said to be El Salvador - see (5), again)
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(1) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_death_rate
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States
(4) https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/race-and-homicide-in-america-by-the-numbers
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
(6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_(United_Nations)
(7) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34996604
(8) http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/23/us/historical-study-of-homicide-and-cities-surprises-the-experts.html

FRIDAY MUSIC: Breton Lays, by JD

Staying with the French theme of recent weeks, here is some very different and distinctive music and dance this week from the region of Bretagne, Brittany. This is the Celtic fringe of France and the final video here is Himne de la Bretagne "Bro gozh ma zadoù " which you will recognise as exactly the same as the Welsh equivalent, Land of my Fathers.

http://visite.bretagne.free.fr/index.php/en/culture.html