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

Africa: Still A Basket Case, by Wiggia

Wiggia is pessimistic about the outlook for South Africa:
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This is a short summary of my feelings after seeing the "address the nation" speech and the other speeches in the South African Parliament; absolutely nothing ever changes there in Africa.

Anyone who has been to Africa will have seen those countries that have “shrugged of the yoke of colonialism” as they like to call it, fail miserably to take advantage of the legacies left by the European settlers.

The scramble for Africa had many faults, the carving up of territories with disregard for tribes was probably the worst mistake, but with exceptions a land sparsely populated then was given a blueprint for a way forward that would enhance their future in a way they could never have dreamed of.

The cry we hear for reparations from African states is nothing more than a hand being held out for endless funds to bolster their total failure to take advantage of that legacy. Certainly Europeans took or made available valuable resources in these countries, resources the inhabitants had no knowledge of or any means to extract or use those resources; it was Europeans that made that possible.

So what happened? For many reasons - greed, personal ambition, the quest for power is all pervading in those countries - graft is on a scale outside the imagination of European politicians. Even relatively minor government officials find ways to squirrel away millions in Swiss bank accounts; and even those who (rarely) are brought to account and jailed or dismissed are immediately replaced by more of the same.

We see Prime Ministers and Presidents from these countries feted on official visits here, politicians who could never legally gain the wealth that they flaunt to the public; yet still they reign, using the power of their parties and corrupt legal processes to build impregnable walls round themselves and their cohorts.

Coincidentally I met one one of these officials when I was working for a client in Bayswater, London. One morning I was outside and the door of the house next door opened and several people came out; all, I discovered, were Nigerian. A smiling man called out good morning and we had a quick chat about the work I was doing next door.

It was only later when talking to my client who owned several properties in the area that he told me who he was and that the Nigerian also owned the property the other side of his: this one always had the curtains closed day and night and is where his “other” wives lived. This was all after this episode that you may remember:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20211380

This of course is just another story in a long list of corruption scandals out of Africa. But it is not just corruption that holds the continent back: power is the real driving force to the universal malaise there. Power and the acquisition of it is the bedrock of all political parties everywhere and here as there how that is gained becomes more questionable and democratic with time.

Yet Africa somehow manages to do all this with acquiescence of its people who blindly believe that any change will deliver them from poverty and that whatever happens whitey is to blame. One can’t blame them, for that it is what their leaders have been telling them for years, because they have no other excuse.

Nothing could be a better example of the above than the maiden speech of Cyril Ramaphosa the new president of SA, finally having ousted the corrupt Jacob ‘I showered so I can’t get AIDS’ Zuma. He starts off his tenure with the popular commitment "land will be appropriated from white farmers without compensation"* giving all the murdering thugs who support the EFF and its leader Julius Malema in the belief he will be the nation's saviour the right to kill and injure white farmers even more than is happening at this time; their choice, of course.

But that route will lead South Africa to the condition of Zimbabwe, and international investment withers on the vine. It does not seem credible that a nation with the resources of SA can disappear down the plughole of incompetence, but sadly once again we are talking about Africa, a continent about to suffer the biggest demographic explosion the world has seen - and they make getting rid of white farmers who feed and export for the nation a priority!

Africa will not change in any meaningful way. It has proved time and again since they got their independence from the European colonialists that the only thing they are good at is wrecking the legacy left and opening Swiss bank accounts on the money the West still gives them, and that includes the charities. It is a basket case.
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*"We will accelerate our land redistribution programme not only to redress a grave historical injustice, but also to bring more producers into the agricultural sector and to make more land available for cultivation... this approach will include the expropriation of land without compensation.

"We are determined that expropriation without compensation should be implemented in a way that increases agricultural production, improves food security and ensure that the land is returned to those from whom it was taken under colonialism and apartheid."

https://www.biznews.com/sa-investing/2018/02/16/cyril-ramaphosa-debut-state-nation/

Labour's conundrum

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/17/labour-dreaming-uk-wants-socialism-privatisation

I suspect the Guardian hates Corbyn and wants Guardian-type socialism instead - the kind where you do well out of doing good, and get to condescend to the lower orders.

The trouble with being the friend of the poor is that you need them to be poor always so you can be their well-paid friend forever.

This is why the way out for the poorly paid and unemployed could come from the sort-of Right rather than the Left. A real Labour Party would seek so to improve the lot of the workers that in time, they wouldn't need the Party. What are the chances of that happening?

In the USA a maverick like Trump is hated not only by the Left (Michael Moore seems to be another one doing well for himself by noisily championing the poor without actually giving them jobs) but by the Right because he is interfering with the extractive setup that has seen a small minority hoovering up the wealth gains of the last 40 years. If he succeeds then we should all forgive his crassness and history of buccaneering business deals.

Is there a British Trump among us?

Cheap cameras, great results, by JD

A reposting from 2010, originally published on Nourishing Obscurity -
http://www.nourishingobscurity.com/2010/09/cheap-cameras/

http://www.nourishingobscurity.com/2010/10/cheap-cameras-2/

JD is big-leggy…………

…and is also a happy shopper….

…and is bemused by silly road signs….

and is also lost…

These pictures were all taken with a digital camera which I bought for £35 at a time when the cheapest Canon or Pentax etc were around £200. It is basically a webcam to sit above the computer screen but can be used out and about as you can see.

Cheap doesn’t always mean bad and expensive isn’t always good.  The camera shown here is an updated version of the one I have.

The picture to the right is of my key ring camera.

The key ring itself is more robust than the flimsy plastic box on the other end of the chain. When I saw it in the shop I thought it was just a novelty but I was assured that it was a real digital camera and it worked.

So for £12 I had myself yet another camera (current count is eight I think) and I set about seeing what it would do.

Because it was so cheap I didn’t mind when this very friendly horse, curious to know what I was up to, stuck its nose over the wall and snorted into the lens. As you can see this toy of a camera produces good pictures.

Two other photographs show that it is good for bold colours and strong shapes and patterns.

Pillar box

Skylight

Pinhole Camera

It’s back to basics with the pinhole camera shown on the left. Can’t remember where I bought it but they are available in the USA from here

Just fold the cardboard, assemble all the other bits and pieces, glue it together and you are ready to go. It takes 120 roll film and gives eight pictures per roll.

With digital photography having almost completely taken over it is difficult to find anywhere that does 120 film processing now. So that and a lack of time means I haven’t fully explored its potential.

But this self portrait sitting outside my little hovel shows what can be achieved:

Those two cameras could be described as Toy Cameras and if you search the internet for Toy Cameras you will discover a whole sub-culture of reactionary enthusiasts dedicated to their Lomo, Holga, Diana or Seagull cameras. (Unfortunately Lomo and Seagull have exploited this enthusiasm and their products are not as cheap as they ought to be.)

And if anybody knows of anywhere that still processes films for my Nimslo 3D camera then I might be able to use it again.

JD adds (18.02.2018):

A necessary postscript is that the two cheap digital cameras no longer function; not because there is anything wrong with them but because the likes of Microsoft have 'improved' their product with Win10 which does not accept old gadgets (my scanner no longer works either).

There was nothing wrong with XP but the technology companies want us to keep on spending money we do not have on their new stuff which is all created in the spirit of Hutber's Law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutber%27s_law 

You can insert swear word of your choice at this point!

FRIDAY MUSIC: Yann Tiersen, by JD

Once more some musique française pour apaiser vos soucis......

This is from Yann Tiersen who is a Breton of Belgian/Norwegian descent. Finistère was not far enough to the west so he currently lives on the island of Ushant, off the coast of Brittany. His new recording studio there will have uninterrupted views of what he calls the Celtic sea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yann_Tiersen
http://yanntiersen.com

On some of the videos below Tierson plays a 5 string violin. Here is a guide to the history and the reason for the additional string-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_string_violin

In the final video here the music is played on a toy piano which I think sounds better than the original grand piano.

The Dream Of Reason (Revisited), by JD

Nearly seven years on, and after an unexpected result in the 2016 EU Referendum, JD offers this reposting, which first appeared on Nourishing Obscurity here:

http://www.nourishingobscurity.com/2011/06/the-dream-of-reason/

JD says:  "It remains appropriate because the EU is still wedded to that dream of reason, that all problems can be resolved by 'wise' political 'elder statesmen'. Bah humbug!"
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El sueño de la razon produce monstruos 
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

I have lost count of the number of times I have seen the title of this etching mistranslated as “The sleep of reason…”

Sueño can mean either sleep or dream depending on the context.

“The dream of reason calls forth monsters” is the correct interpretation.

When you are asleep you are unconscious and brain activity is flat. When you are dreaming, the subconscious is actively creating pleasantries or nightmares according to your inner true nature, as in the scene above.

Goya lived through a turbulent period in European history and, even though he was a proponent of the political enlightenment and freedoms promised by the French Revolution of 1789, he became aware of the Terror that followed, where Reason prevailed and the old ways were swept away.

No one is innocent once he has seen what I have seen. I witnessed how the noblest ideals of freedom and progress were transformed into lances, sabres, and bayonets. Arson, looting and rape, all supposed to bring a New Order, in reality only exchanged the garrotte for the gallows.

After the defeat of Napoleon in 1814, Goya sought to commemorate Spanish resistance to Napoleon’s armies during the occupation of 1808 with this painting. Along with its companion piece of the same size, El dos de mayo de 1808 en Madrid (La carga de los mamelucos en la Puerta del Sol) it was commissioned by the provisional government of Spain at Goya’s suggestion.

El 3 de Mayo de 1808 en Madrid. (Los fusilamientos en la montaña del Príncipe Pío)

As Goya noted, the ideal of reason does not produce reasonable behaviour.

Germany and the Russian Revolution; George Soros and... ?

Gosh, will I ever cease to be so ignorant. Douglas Adams' hapless hero Arthur Dent  "no more knows his own destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company," and until Peter Hitchens' column today (second section, here) I didn't know Germany started the Russian Revolution to free up 50 divisions from the Eastern Front and (so nearly) win the Great War in the West.

I'd always fuzzily assumed that Lenin had been deported from Germany (in a sealed train) as an undesirable; I hadn't known that the plan was not to deport, but to export him - to send a spark into the Russian gunpowder room.

An explosive situation prepared, it seems, with some 50 million gold marks funding high-print-run, quality-paper subversive newspapers among the Russian armed forces and factory workers:

http://www.thehistoryforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=30125

In the same edition of the Mail On Sunday - a paper edited by a Scot who, confusingly, wants independence for Scotland but for the UK to remain in Europe - George Soros is allowed to tell his version of the story in the controversy over his funding the pro-Remain "Best For Britain."

I don't know what Soros' game is, but if he wants more amicable relations between the increasingly hysterical and demanding EU negotiators and the limp-as-old-lettuce UK leadership, wouldn't he do better to grease the wheels on the European side?

What does he imagine to be the eventual result of unrestricted movement of people into a country like ours with high (albeit disguised) unemployment - not to mention skewed employment, away from wealth production and into various forms of bandaging for a wounded society - and a generous but ever more unaffordable Welfare state? Is it - revolution?

FRIDAY MUSIC: Moriarty, by JD

The 'three French hens' a couple of weeks ago seems to have been very popular. The final video in that set was labelled "Jimmy (Moriarty cover)" so, naturally, I looked for the original and what I found was another group of French musicians who turn out to be rather good also. You can read about them here- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriarty_(band)

The sound quality/balance is less than good on one or two of these videos; apologies for that, hope it doesn't spoil your enjoyment.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Edgar Meyer and friends, by JD

This music post came about after listening to the violinist Joshua Bell on Radio 3 last week. Among the tracks played during the interview was one from an album called Short Trip Home which Bell had recorded with the virtuoso double bass player Edgar Meyer and others, a strange mix of bluegrass and classical. My curiosity aroused, I looked for more of the same on YouTube and found a whole new world of wonderful music and what follows is a selection from Edgar Meyer and friends.

Meyer himself began playing bass at the age of five! The mind boggles at the image of a small child grappling with a musical instrument almost twice his size but, no doubt, there are ways around such minor problems. You can read a short bio of him here in which The New Yorker calls him “…the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively un-chronicled history of his instrument.”
http://edgarmeyer.com/about/

JAZZ: Seated One day At The Organ, by Wiggia

Not an obvious choice for the playing of jazz, but these examples show it can be done with some aplomb.








Very brave lady, Sandra Kaye, taking on the mighty Wurlitzer with such bad acoustics.............

and to finish on the pipe organ at the Rockefeller Chapel, Chicago, Barbara Dennerlein.



Bonus footage: the largest working organ in the world (28,500 pipes):

The Contradictions of US Education, by Paddington

What are we doing wrong in the US education system?

The short answer is: nothing.

The appropriate way to evaluate a system is based on what it is designed to do, and the education system is not designed to do anything. Rather, throughout 200 years of public education, it has been given a sequence of demands, and has responded by adapting organically.

Among other things, the system has been required to:

• prepare young men for factories and the military, and young women for marriage and domestic service;
• serve as a mechanism for upward social mobility (Dewey);
• produce an educated electorate (Jefferson);
• generate 'well-rounded' individuals;
• serve as a minor league for professional sports;
• fix major social problems (Head Start);
• provide enough science and engineering majors to keep the economy working;
• graduate most students, each immediately ready to be successful in higher education, or prepared for a job;

with no recognition that some of these goals are in direct conflict.

For example, demanding increased performance necessarily means that more students will fail to clear the bar. Alternatively, demanding increased graduation rates necessarily leads to grade inflation and lowering the bar. There is no way around this, as it is precisely the problem of Type I and Type II errors in statistical testing.

The over-emphasis on sports in some districts, and the effect on grade inflation, has been well-recorded. What is rarely noted is the effect on the other students. If unprepared student athletes, or others who seem to put no effort into their studies, still progress to the higher grades, what is the immediate incentive to work hard?

If teachers are trying to fix every social problem in their classrooms, where is the time for learning? In my experience, the more talented students tend to get less attention, because 'they will learn anyway'. This is a recipe for mediocrity.

In short, before we try yet another major overhaul of the system, we should perhaps first decide the goals to be met, and also check that those goals are actually achievable.

Music for Burns Night, by JD

The songs of Robert Burns:

FRIDAY MUSIC: More French Hens, by JD

On the third day of Christmas Mr S posted a video by 'three French hens' and I thought the three young ladies, known collectively as LEJ, were rather good (that video was, as it turns out, played at the wrong speed and the image was reversed but no matter, they deserved further investigation!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.E.J

We deserve an encore (but not in France, when they wish for an 'encore' they will shout bis! as they do also in Belgium. On the other hand I might have been misinformed! However the OED confirms it.)

Zero hours

"Two hours at normal power, or six to eight hours at economical cruising speed." I'll settle for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_A6M_Zero

FRIDAY MUSIC: Ray Thomas 1941 - 2018, by JD

"He is not dead, he doth not sleep -- he hath awakened from the dream of life --"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Thomas

"Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form" -

(Plato). (Wordsworth Dictionary of Musical Quotations, 1991, p. 45).
https://voices.no/community/?q=colgrocke061106

The death culture advances another step

It was inevitable. Once you concede the right to kill unborn children, with time limits shifting back and forth in no-man's-land, someone would eventually suggest that infanticide could also become legally permissible, perhaps even a moral duty. That someone - and he started in on this 40 years ago - is Peter "animal rights" Singer who

"began to argue that it is ethical to give parents the option (in consultation with doctors) to euthanise infants with disabilities."

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-about-disability-and-infanticide-from-peter-singer

In consultation with doctors, of course. The white coat makes all the difference - remember the Milgram experiment?

At the other end of life, we have "mercy killings" - again, something to be legalised and left to doctors.

I suppose that at some point these tendencies will meet in the middle. For if allowing the deformed or crippled to live is cruelty, why should there be any upper age limit to "termination" or whatever mealy-mouthed term is in fashion at the time?

Once we accept that human life is not sacred and that it can be assessed in terms of money and convenience, we're off down the slippery slope.

Already, the British Government is encroaching on our (or our family's) right to our own bodies, proposing a presumed right to "harvest" (another sweetened obscenity) organs in the absence of an "opt-out"; the Chinese are a little further ahead at the moment, killing political prisoners on demand for their spare bodily parts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China

There certainly are issues to be discussed, but one thing I won't have is an assumption that ethical matters are to be delegated to (or grabbed by) paid philosophers, politicians and doctors - authority, in short. The way things are going, maybe one day we could see posthumous pardons for a Continental government that did all the above in the 1930s and 1940s.

We Want Plates! - by Wiggia

This was prompted by a piece on the David Thompson blog and my personal antipathy to much that calls itself trendy in the strange world of modern celebrity chef led restaurants.

I wrote some while back about the modern practice of decorating plates rather than putting food on them, but that has been pushed aside as the current trend for serving on anything but plates gathers momentum. So much so that a website and Twitter account seeks out the ridiculous levels this diversion from food itself has reached; it has been spoken of as "performance art" by those up-their-own-backsides "hipster" chefs  !

The desire to get bums on seats runs perilously close to insanity in some cases but the modern world takes it all in its stride as little seems to shock or surprise any more: restaurants with toilets for seats, another with urinal pots holding flowers on the table seemingly gather a clientele that thinks these gimmicks are worth paying for; so be it, it's their money.

But the replacement of eminently proved and practical ceramic plates is a step too far. It could be said that this trend is nothing new - chicken in a basket was around long before the advent of the plate substitutes, as was the Chianti bottle wrapped in raffia and adorning Italian restaurant tables as a lamp throughout the land even in the fifties (this latter, believe it or not, is making a comeback.)

The wood, the slate, the half brick, the paper towel all run parallel with strange new ceramics that are designed to frustrate the diner. A nine-inch surround to a plate leaves a deliberately small area for food and nowhere to put your cutlery unless you want it to slide into whatever is in the middle; the bowl with a top rim at different levels is very near to the aforementioned urinal in shape, so could they be trying to tell us something about the food therein? Or the extreme oblong plates that make eating akin to playing the piano.

The platters, as they are known, have recently come in for a food standards agency fine in one Birmingham restaurant, having not been cleaned properly and looking repulsive - this after a previous warning. This event has kick-started the fight back against the "anything but plates" outfits (and there are many of them.)

I first encountered the slate plate some years back in a Michelin starred restaurant that served a fish dish on the slate. The peas were served in a small bowl that sat on the edge as for obvious reasons they could not be served on the slate - what was the bloody point? I laughed when it was served and the chef/proprietor was not amused when I asked for a plate: he explained it was part of the presentation - back to performance art !

Anyway here is a selection of the extremes that today's restaurants go to to divert your eyes  and thoughts away from the actual food, starting with the wonderful example of a full English on a grease-proof paper mat on a board with the beans in a coffee cup and the coffee in a jar ?

Democracy is neither Right nor Left

The above video is of a Newsnight opinion piece by David Aaronovitch. He appears to relish sharing with us some morbid calculations by Peter Kellner to suggest that we need only wait for the older generation to die in order to subvert Britain's withdrawal from the EU.

Underneath this, I think, is the illusion that support for democracy is somehow exclusively a feature of the Right - an illusion that many half-wittedly debating these things on social media seem to share.

They may not understand that opposition to membership of the EU was and should still be heartily supported by those on the Left, as well as by Conservative voters, who share a love of their country. It was Macmillan and Heath that got us in; Peter Shore....



... Michael Foot, George Galloway, Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner etc who did and do oppose - on democratic grounds. UKIP itself was founded by Professor Alan Sked (still living and fighting) as a Left opposition to the EU.

I suspect that getting us into the EU (as it now is) was not only a project sponsored by the USA but was seen by certain elements in the British Conservative Party as a lasting solution to suppress British socialism and those pesky unions.* Just look at Heath's simmering rage in confronting a socialist, not so say arrogance and rudeness (not once politely calling Foot "Mister" as the latter scrupulously called him back) in this 1975 TV interview/debate:



We democrats may have our political differences but we are united on the principle that it is the people who should be informed and who should decide. It's not a left-right thing, except insofar that there is a group on the right that thinks (as the Communists do, and New Labour seemed to) the common man should accept being treated like a family pet and shouldn't complain as long as his master throws him some food.

"Pet-ernalism", perhaps.

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*And the popular perception of trade unions as simply greedy troublemakers - though some there were - fails to take into account decades of major economic and monetary mismanagement -  by parties of both colours - that helped lead to the high, wealth-destroying inflation of the 1970s.

A Quick Guide To Democracy

Too Good Not To Share

UPDATE: alas, too good to last! It was the BBC's 2016 production of "Peter Pan Goes Wrong."

Absolutely magnificent:



A reprise of the 2016 production; unbeatable!

Twelfth Night

Image source

Shine out, fair Sun, with all your heat,

Show all your thousand-coloured light!

Black Winter freezes to his seat;

The grey wolf howls, he does so bite;

Crookt Age on three knees creeps the street;

The boneless fish close quaking lies

And eats for cold his aching feet;

The stars in icicles arise:

Shine out, and make this winter night

Our beauty's Spring, our Prince of Light!

by George Chapman

from "The Masque of the Twelve Months", first performed on Twelfth Night 1619

Image source

On The Twelfth Day Of Christmas

FRIDAY MUSIC: An Orthodox Christmas, by JD

As we come to the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas and the Orthodox Churches prepare to celebrate their Christmas Day it seems appropriate to join them with some of their traditional Christmas music -

On The Eleventh Day Of Christmas

JD adds:

It is a tradition in Spain to have a procession on the evening of 5th January of the arrival of the three wise men, the Cabalgate de los Reyes Magos:

https://www.enforex.com/culture/reyes-magos.html

Potholes: a lesson never learned

Potholes are a popular item for discussion around this time of the year: the first hard frosts and persistent rain bring about an explosion of these obstacles on our roads with a regularity that is now an acceptable fact of life.

A twenty mile journey on a local A road that I had to make in pretty awful conditions highlighted the true state of potholes in this area and I suspect everywhere else. Constant neglect of our road system and the temporary repair ideology that all councils adopt in the name of cut backs has left the road I traveled on looking in large parts like a cross between the Nairobi – Mombasa highway - anyone who has traveled on that will know what I mean - and no-man's-land in the Somme. The endlessly refilled potholes had as one succumbed to the cold and wet and scattered their collective innards all over the highway leaving an assortment of craters to be avoided.

This annual farce forced upon the populace by hand-wringing local government officials as an inevitable consequence  of “cuts” is, as has been pointed out by those who really know about such things, nothing more than money down the drain, as the temporary repairs last for ever shorter spans. We have one at a small road junction nearby that has been filled three times this year alone, showing the cost of the short-sighted approach to this and all the other infrastructure defects in this country.

A good resurfacing will last without further maintenance for a predictable time if the work has been properly carried out, and so the costs can be reliably approximated. Continually employing people to fill ever more potholes is a waste of taxpayers' money as eventually the road will have to be resurfaced at greater cost than originally due to excess damage, and the refilling money has to be added to that.

Anybody coming back from a continental trip can see the disparity between our road infrastructure and that abroad and the gap in the quality is growing apace, year by year .

I suspect the government is fully aware of the problem but successive governments  have failed to do anything meaningful about it and now the cost has reached a prohibitive level, such is the problem unless toll roads are introduced (and they are not coming anytime soon, but will come as necessity demands.)  No political party wants to be “unpopular”-  which is rather funny considering none of them are popular - and they will kick the can down the road as long as possible, until perhaps another party has to deal with it as they do with everything else.

In Africa you get enterprising men who stand by the badly potholed roads with a large pile of gravel, and if you give them a small amount of cash they will fill a few holes; perhaps a cottage industry on those lines could be started up here !

If the trend in neglect continues will we all have to fit monster truck tyres to our family cars in order to navigate the ever increasing number and size of these craters? Will the I-Spy books make a come back with "I-Spy the biggest pothole"? Will they become part of our national heritage and demand national treasure status, perhaps even an AA * star grading? All is possible, for certainly they are not going away.

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Sackerson comments:

On The Tenth Day Of Christmas

On The Ninth Day Of Christmas

The art of Rita Loureiro

"Boi vento" (Ox wind), by Rita Loureiro

Image source: http://animaelibri.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/arte-rita-loureiro.html

There is a mysterious illustration on the cover of the 1984 English translation of  Mário de Andrade's book "Macunaíma" (1928):

Image source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1099648.Macuna_ma

The artwork is by Rita Loureiro (not to be confused with the Brazilian actress of the same name).

What struck me is the alien feeling of it. It does not look to me like what a European artist might do, and one senses some informed, intuitive connection with the weird subject.

It's not easy to find much about Loureiro on the Web, at least not in English, but this site gives a few biographical details: http://animaelibri.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/arte-rita-loureiro.html.

According to this, she was born in 1952 in the old rubber plantation town of Manaus, a city in the heart of the Brazilian rainforest (Amazonas Region). [Manaus may ring a bell with you: it's where an Irish fortune-seeker carried a steamship over the mountains, as in the film "Fitzcarraldo."] Loureiro moved to Rio de Janeiro to begin her career as an artist but (if I understand correctly) returned to the rainforest region to develop her art and understanding of the aboriginals/first peoples.

It seems she produced a number of illustrations for "Macunaíma", which don't appear in the English translation and as yet I haven't established exactly which edition (this limited edition from 1984? or this?) of this seminal Brazilian work does contain them, though here are a couple:

Image source: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/119978777556191067/

http://nabc.org.br/arquivo/nabcIII63/loureiro.jpg

There is more of her work to be found here, at the Itaú Cultural centre in São Paulo:
http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa1387/rita-loureiro

Desfoliante Naranja (1983) [Orange defoliant] Image citation

Boi Floresta (1982) [Ox Forest] Image citation

A Dança da Morte (1989) [The dance of Death] Image citation

Carta Pras Icamabias (1981) [Letter to the Amazons - illustration for "Macunaíma"] Image citation

To me, it seems that an overarching theme or approach is seeing humans in a context full of meaning, whether social, natural or cultural-religious-magical, a turning away from the modern "homeless mind" and entirely in keeping with Andrade's  disgusted view of São Paulo as seen through Macunaíma's forest-bred eyes.

This photo of Pinacoteca do Estado is courtesy of TripAdvisor

See reviews (2015 - 2017) of the gallery in Manaus here:

https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g303235-d2364491-r394775627-Pinacoteca_do_Estado-Manaus_Amazon_River_State_of_Amazonas.html#UR394775627

That's not to make the savages into hygienised Walt Disney characters; one of Andrade's chapters describes a macumba rite involving nudity, unbridled sex and uninhibited violence against a female temporarily possessed by a demon so that Macunaíma can by proxy inflict his revenge on a rival. Macumba is an umbrella term for a group of religious-magical syntheses - local, African and Christian - see https://www.britannica.com/topic/Macumba.

The Galeria do Largo in her home town of Manaus has a web page on her from her 2006 exhibition there, which also lists some of her previous shows. One of these was "Boi Tema" (Ox Theme) in 1984 and after, turned into a book in 1987. The ox is celebrated in various ways across Brazil, in death-and-rebirth rituals known as the Bumba-meu-boi.  A 2004 guide to Barcelona says that in Brazil, the celebration has its roots in nineteenth century cattle farming there, though of course the ox has ritual significance in many other places in the world; but the same guide refers to a Bantu festival centred around an ox named Geroa; I had thought that the Bantu were in South or South-West Africa but it seems they originated in the angle of west Africa by modern day Nigeria/Cameroon; so quite possibly one of the roots of Bumba-meu-boi springs from the cultural complex transmitted to South America via the West African slave trade.

O Boi, a Morte do Verde e a Represa (1984) [The ox, the death of the green land, and the dam] Image citation

Like Andrade, then, Rita Loureiro's art is a transmission of the old world's voice to the new and rootless incomers.

A green New Year's Eve meteor streaks across UK skies

On The Eighth Day Of Christmas

Did China just send the USA a coded military message?

Last night there was a display of mini-drones in formation over Guangzhou, ostensibly to celebrate the New Year.

But clearly coordinating over 1,000 drones so perfectly is unlikely to be a job for an army of fallible humans.

Imagine a battlefield where instead of dumping 500-pound smart-guided bombs out of circling jet fighters with only a short "playtime" to kill a handful of insurgents, a swarm of computer-controlled heat-seeking/visually guided dronelets seek out and kill individuals precisely and cheaply, with a few ounces of explosive each.

The potential has been discussed online within the last two years, e.g. here:

https://scout.com/military/warrior/Article/Air-Force-Seeks-Swarms-of-Attack-Mini-Drones-101454682

Was China saying, we're there now and woe betide etc.?

NYE: East meets West

In Australia, New Year's Eve fireworks really go with a bang:



... while in Guangzhou, the night has a thousand eyes drones...



(htp: RT.com)

On The Seventh Day Of Christmas

Hogmanay revels continue

A guid New Year to ane an` a` and mony may ye see!

While New Year's Eve is celebrated around the world, the Scots have a long rich heritage associated with this event - and we have our own name for it, Hogmanay.

There are many theories about the derivation of the word "Hogmanay". The Scandinavian word for the feast preceding Yule was "Hoggo-nott" while the Flemish words (many have come into Scots) "hoog min dag" means "great love day". Hogmanay could also be traced back to the Anglo-Saxon, Haleg monath, Holy Month, or the Gaelic, oge maidne, new morning. But the most likely source seems to be the French. "Homme est né" or "Man is born" while in France the last day of the year when gifts were exchanged was "aguillaneuf" while in Normandy presents given at that time were "hoguignetes". Take your pick!

In Scotland a similar practice to that in Normandy was recorded, rather disapprovingly, by the Church. "It is ordinary among some Plebians in the South of Scotland, to go about from door to door upon New Year`s Eve, crying Hagmane." Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence, 1693.

Christmas was not celebrated as a festival and virtually banned in Scotland for around 400 years. (I think it became a public holiday round about 1960.) The reason for Christmas not being celebrated has its roots in the Protestant Reformation when the Kirk portrayed Christmas as a Popish or Catholic feast and therefore had to be banned. Many Scots had to work over Christmas and their winter solstice holiday was therefore at New Year when family and friends gathered for a party and exchange presents, especially for the children. There are traditions before midnight such as cleaning the house on 31st December (including taking out the ashes from the fire in the days when coal fires were common). There is also the superstition to clear all your debts before "the bells" at midnight. (I wonder how many people still try to clear their debts!)

An integral part of the Hogmanay partying, which continues very much today, is to welcome friends and strangers, with warm hospitality to wish everyone a Guid New Year. The underlying belief is to clear out the vestiges of the old year, have a clean break and welcome in a young, New Year on a happy note.

"First footing" (that is, the "first foot" in the house after midnight) is not as common as it used to be in Scotland. To ensure good luck for the house, the first foot should be male, dark (believed to be a throwback to the Viking days when blond strangers arriving on your doorstep meant trouble) and should bring symbolic coal, shortbread, salt, black bun and whisky. These days, however, whisky and perhaps shortbread are the only items still prevalent and very welcome they are!.

And of course it has become traditional to overindulge and wake up the following day with a 'sair heid'. -