Evening Standard #fail

Credited to: A History of Britain From Above, by James Crawford, Katy Whitaker & Allan Williams

It is about 105 miles from the Evening Standard‘s London office to Bournemouth Pier. Was even so in 1931.

New bust for London

Yesterday it was LT124 … and there’s something (as left) you don’t see too often. Fortunately. But seems to be happening too often. Unfortunately.

It’s also £354,000 (apparently the contract price, each, over the intended 600) of badly-bent vanity vehicle, foisted in the London tax-payers.

So far, that’s the fourth “event” involving one of these badly-ventilated, daft — even dangerous — staircased, three doored (though one closed on a semi-permanent basis) lard buses. A sad record for the over-hyped:

…monarch of the road,
Observer of the highway code,
That big six-wheeler,
Scarlet painted,
BoJo transport,
Hybrid engined,
Seriously overweight omnibus.

[We can knock out such rubbish, At The Drop of a Hat. We sincerely apologise for mistakes afterwards. BoJo never does.]

It looks as if LT124 was attempting to make the turn into the bus garage, and #Failed.

There are precedents

By all accounts, this is the fourth smash by one of these behemoths, and the second in a week. Acording to @BorisWatch:

four of Boris’s expensive buses are now broken: LT35, LT62, LT96 and LT124, all drove into something hard and unyielding.

And that amounts to :

2.8% of the fleet, if applied city-wide would be 200+ buses always off the road due to accidents. Doubt that happens.

It also appears that two of those “incidents” occurred five and six months ago, but the vehicles remain unrepaired and unusable.

Something is wrong, certainly politically, certainly administratively, possibly mechanically, and it’s time someone came clean.

If not the organ-grinder-in-chief, then the mini-Me sub-grinder (who also seems to have been at it), or — as a last resort — some designated flak-catcher (Leon Daniels, “responsible for the safe and efficient delivery of London’s bus services“) could be earning his £328,448+ exes crust.

Alex Salmond defines #indyref

In the 1980s, while I was compiling the oil and gas index, David Cameron was still fooling around on the playing fields of Eton.

In that sentence, on the BBC Today programme,  Alex Salmond identified my problem with the Scottish Referendum.

He presumably intended to imply his experience over Cameron’s jejune effeteness. Or, in Francis Bacon’s usage, effete

Ieiunenesse or extreme Comminution of Spirits.

For Salmond’s deserved contempt ought to raise the question,

What and who is Scottish “Independence” for?

Because, if it is for the bankers and oil economists, I want nothing to do with it.

My concept of Scottish independence would be something more robust:

It’s a thocht that wad gar our rottans,
Aa thae rogues that gang gallus fresh an gay,
Tak the road an seek ither loanins
Wi thair ill-ploys tae sport an play

Or, as Béarla (= in common English):

It’s a thought that would drive our vermin,
all the rogues who strut and swagger,
to take the road and seek other fields,
to go and play elsewhere with their wicked tricks.

Hamish Henderson, Seumas Mór’s soaring verse transcends petty capitalist nationalism, but it serves here to illustrate the poverty of the SNP vision.

An old romantic concludes:

Perhaps, if anyone, John Maclean, the old Clydeside Marxist, — back in 1923, not long before his early death — came close, if naïvely, to defining a credible free and independent Scotland:

Russia could not produce the World Revolution. Neither can we in Gorbals, in Scotland, in Great Britain. Before England is ready I am sure the next war will be on us. I therefore consider that Scotland’s wisest policy is to declare for a republic in Scotland, so that the youths of Scotland will not be forced out to die for England’s markets.

I accordingly stand out as a Scottish Republican candidate, feeling sure that if Scotland had to elect a Parliament to sit in Glasgow it would vote for a working-class Parliament.

Such a Parliament would have to use the might of the workers to force the land and the means of production in Scotland out of the grasp of the brutal few who control them, and place them at the full disposal of the community. The Social Revolution is possible sooner in Scotland than in England…

Jejune

I’m going to employ it in a post coming up.

Let’s get that word by its withers.

Kingsley Amis had a typically acerbic rant on this, imagining the transition of jej(e)une through three users:

Stage 1: A writes: “His arguments are unoriginal and jejune” (A knows that ‘jejune’ means ‘thin, unsatisfying’, a rare word, admittedly, but one with a nice ring to it).

Stage 2: B notices the nice ring. He doesn’t know what the word means and, of course, wouldn’t dream of consulting a dictionary even if he possessed one. There is something vaguely French as well as nice about the ring to ‘jejune’; in fact, now he comes to think of it, it reminds him of ‘jeune’, which he knows means ‘young’. Peering at the context, he sees that ‘jejune’ could mean, if not exactly ‘young’, then something like ‘un-grown-up, immature, callow’. Hooray! — he’s always needing words for that, and here’s a new one, one of superior quality, too.

Stage 3: B starts writing stuff like “much of the dialogue is jejune, in fact downright childish.” With the latest edition of OED giving ‘peurile’ as a sense of ‘jejune’, the story might be thought to be over, but there is one further stage.

Stage 4: Having ‘jeune’ in their heads, people who have never seen the word in print start pronouncing ‘jejune’ not as ‘djiJOON’ but ‘zherZHERN’, in the apparent belief that French people always give a tiny stutter when they say ‘jeune’. (I have heard ‘zherZHERN’ several times in the last few years). Finally C takes the inevitable step of writing ‘jejeune’ (I have seen several examples) or even, just that much better: “Although the actual arguments are a little jéjeune, the staging of the mass scenes are [sic] impressive.” Italics in original! – which, with the newly acquired acute accent in place set the seal on the deportation of an English word into French, surely a unique event.

That, pretty well, covers the waterfront.

Except …

Amis is self-evidently a boring old fart, protective of the language of , for and because of similar boring old farts.

For jejune is an early-seventeenth-century Anglicising of the Latin adjective, ieiunus [“having consumed no food or drink, fasting, hungry empty”].  No more, no less. Cicero, in his second letter to Atticus, is using it in a derived sense [“Deficient in goodness, meagre, starved”]. From there Cicero, elsewhere, makes simple metaphoric leaps and the term refers to unproductive land, and then to poor literary style.

In place of the Latinate term, we might supply, as the OED does:

dull, flat, insipid, bald, dry, uninteresting; meagre, scanty, thin, poor; wanting in substance or solidity.

De haut en bas

An objection might be those terms, as a catalogue, are hardly a shorthand. Nor, singly or collectively, do they convincingly express the note of superior snootiness implied when we deploy jejune. For that we need to go to Shaw’s stage-direction in Act II of Arms and the Man, telling us more than we need to know of the Byronic Major Sergius Saranoff:

By his brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but of himself, to live up to his imaginative ideals, his consequent cynical scorn for humanity, the jejune credulity as to the absolute validity of his ideals and the unworthiness of the world in disregarding them, his wincings and mockeries under the sting of the petty disillusions which every hour spent among men brings to his infallibly quick observation, he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air, the mysterious moodiness, the suggestion of a strange and terrible history that has left him nothing but undying remorse, by which Childe Harold fascinated the grandmothers of his English contemporaries.

Which is why, in this intended post, it will be applied to David Cameron.

A problem of geometric geography

Tom Whipple, “Science Correspondent”, of The Times has a piece on how to rescue the flooded Somerset Levels:

Building a vast tidal lagoon in the Severn Estuary would be a better way to combat floods in the Somerset Levels than dredging and would generate a significant amount of renewable energy, a senior hydrologist has said.

Roger Falconer, of Cardiff University, argued that the government decision to ignore expert advice and dredge rivers in the region was not just largely pointless but contradicted the “fundamental laws of fluid dynamics”.

Here’s the bit that has me totally confused:

“In the Somerset Levels, you’ve virtually got a horizontal water slope,” Professor Falconer said. “The real solution to flooding is to increase the slope. Raising the land is out of the question, so what you need to do is effectively drop the sea level.”

See my problem: a horizontal water slope, whether virtually or not, seems self-contradictory.

As for effectively dropping the sea level, there is a precedent. Send for Cecil B. DeMille.

Twenty gone. How many more?

York has many good pubs. Some provide for locals. Many inside the walls are more for the tourists and day-trippers. Many new venues have opened: occasionally the new opening is “older” than what it replaces:

This week the York Press has a feature on a score that have been lost over the last two decades. It is currently the “most shared” item on the site.

Nostalgia isn’t enough

To be honest, many of these lost pubs look as welcoming as a bucket of spit. Saying they are “greatly missed” takes hyperbole to new levels. They closed because their trade had gone. Story: end of.

What is equally depressing is that, when pubs are demolished for housing, the replacement buildings have all the architectural merit of yet another concrete block.

We have come a long way in the twenty years the Press feature covers. The choice of beers has improved enormously — many York pubs have half-a-dozen on hand-pump — a favourite of mine (though it’s the other side of the Ouse, and a fair stroll) is the much-touted Brigantes.  One of its more positive features is that it isn’t on the most beaten track from station to centre. It is personable, and does a good job. Long may it and its like prosper.

We even have our own York Brewery (and its excellent Terrier and Guzzler brews).

Food is now the norm — and often of decent quality. As the clientele has changed, so have the facilities, the seating, the … err … ambiance.

If pubs have to work harder for their custom, that is no bad thing.

The Great Rat-wagon contest

Long-gone days of school summer holidays involved trucking young daughters to camp-sites in the south of France. It was necessary to invent diversions, competitions and games to keep them occupied in the longueurs of the driving.

Piggling

This was aeons before Jeremy Clarkson and co. started picking on them.

What was required was to spot a caravan, cry “Piggle!” A more sophisticated version required the counting of the number of vehicles trapped behind the obstruction: longest queue wins that day’s round.

This was the “I am the snail. You are the slime” challenge.

Naming bridges

Each motorway bridge deserves a name.

Spot a bridge. Give it an appropriate title. Marks awarded, as in ice-dancing, diving and similar non-sports, for style and interpretation.

Mister/Monsieur/Mein Herr Blob

This, in more egalitarian and sympathetic days, would be considered offensive and discriminatory.

Spot an obese, over-extended belly. Claim him as the parochial, provincial, regional or national champion.

And the best game of the lot …

Rat-wagons

In those days French and Belgian roads featured large numbers of those strange corrugated-sided vans. Many were Peugeots, but the prime specimens were — without question — aged Citroen H vans.

Since the Type H was produced over three-and-a-half decades (1947-1981) and there were going on half-a-million of them, some still in daily use, some reduced to hen-huts, there was a wealth of material to abuse and mock.

A rat-wagon is identifiable by:

• its lack of speed (though alternative, imaginative, non-mobile uses were regarded as a bonus);
• its obstructiveness; and — above all —
• by advanced decay and rust.

The ultimate all-time winner was spotted being used as a road-side fish-stall in Versailles: it clearly hadn’t shifted in years, and probably never again could, without dissolving into a heap of iron oxide.

So, this morning the Pert Young Piece recalls the fun, with a photo from her iPhone, taken in Park Road, Hornsey:

Her caption is:

Needs more rust

Were James Joyce dealing with the Daily Mail …

As in the opening chapter of A Portrait of the Artist:

He hid under the table. His mother said:

— O, Stephen will apologize.

Dante said:

— O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.—
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize,
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes.
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize.

Were Will Shagsper (Tight Ass an’ Dromey Knickers, Act V, scene i) responding to a shlock-horror Daily Mail sensation:

First Goth: What, canst thou say all this, and never blush?

AARON: Ay, like a black dog, as the saying is.

LUCIUS: Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?

AARON: Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day- and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse —
Wherein I did not some notorious ill;
As kill a man, or else devise his death;
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it;
Accuse some innocent, and forswear myself;
Set deadly enmity between two friends;
Make poor men’s cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg’d up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends’ door
Even when their sorrows almost was forgot,
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters
‘Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.’
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly;
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

Were one being Miltonic and prolix in responding to a Daily Mail slander:

Albeit, that in doing this I shall be sensible of two things which to me will be nothing pleasant; the one is, that not unlikely I shall be thought too much a party in mine own cause, and therein to see least: the other, that I shall be put unwillingly to molest the public view with the vindication of a private name; as if it were worth the while that the people should care whether such a one were thus or thus. Yet those I entreat who have found the leisure to read that name, however of small repute, unworthily defamed, would be so good and so patient as to hear the same person not unneedfully defended. I will not deny but that the best apology against false accusers is silence and sufferance, and honest deeds set against dishonest words. And that I could at this time most easily and securely, with the least loss of reputation, use no other defence, I need not despair to win belief; whether I consider both the foolish contriving and ridiculous aiming of these his slanderous bolts, shot so wide of any suspicion to be fastened on me, that I have oft with inward contentment perceived my friends congratulating themselves in my innocence, and my enemies ashamed of their partner’s folly: or whether I look at these present times wherein most men, now scarce permitted the liberty to think over their own concernments, have removed the seat of their thoughts more outward to the expectation of public events: or whether the examples of men, either noble or religious, who have sat down lately with a meek silence and sufferance under many libellous endorsements, may be a rule to others, I might well appease myself to put up any reproaches in such an honourable society of fellow-sufferers, using no other defence. And were it that slander would be content to make an end where it first fixes, and not seek to cast out the like infamy upon each thing that hath but any relation to the person traduced, I should have pleaded against this confuter by no other advocates than those which I first commended, silence and sufferance, and speaking deeds against faltering words. But when I discerned his intent was not so much to smite at me, as through me to render odious the truth which I had written, and to stain with ignominy that evangelic doctrine which opposes the tradition of prelaty; I conceived myself to be now not as mine own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was persuaded, and whereof I had declared openly to be a partaker. Whereupon I thought it my duty, if not to myself yet to the religious cause I had in hand, not to leave on my garment the least spot or blemish in good name, so long as God should give me to say that which might wipe it off. Lest those disgraces, which I ought to suffer, if it so befall me, for my religion, through my default religion be made liable to suffer for me. And, whether it might not something reflect upon those reverent men, whose friend I may be thought in writing the Animadversions, was not my last care to consider; if I should rest under these reproaches, having the same common adversary with them, it might be counted small credit for their cause to have found such an assistant, as this babbler hath devised me. What other thing in his book there is of dispute or question, in answering thereto I doubt not to be justified; except there be who will condemn me to have wasted time in throwing down that which could not keep itself up. As for others, who notwithstanding what I can allege have yet decreed to misinterpret the intents of my reply, I suppose they would have found as many causes to have misconceived the reasons of my silence.

Were Captain Nathan Cutting Brittles (John Wayne) dealing with the Daily Mail (and summarising Milton, above):

Never apologize. It’s a sign of weakness.

Liberalism lives

I doubt that many made this association. I only did so because of a warped mind, and a preference for movies over deep philosophising (and didn’t my degree suffer as a result).

These last few days the Daily Mail has a new bone to gnaw. Having failed to nail Ed Miliband as “the enemy within” (or at least the son thereof), it needed easier meat.

Out of the blue (true, deep Tory Blue), the Mail discovered (or rather rediscovered — it is a serial slur)  that Harriet Harman, her husband Jack Dromey and Patricia Hewitt were:

Apologists for paedophiles … all linked to a group lobbying for the right to have sex with children

The “link” is somewhat tangential. All three named “suspects” were active, many years ago, in the National Council for Civil Liberties. The NCCL was open to all willing supporters. The Paedophile Information Exchange was one of several hundreds, if not thousands, of affiliates. Therefore, in the definition of the Daily Mail, there has to be a direct dot-to-dot.

Harriet Harman has issued a powerful (and, to me, convincing) refutation of the Mail smears. Don’t take it from me: read it for yourself.

The connection

The NCCL is the British equivalent of the American Civil Liberties Union. Every denigration of the ACLU has already been rehearsed, honed and perfected by the American Right. The Mail is just buying into the play-book.

The American President was a more-than-decent 1995 Rob Reiner movie. The script was by Aaron Sorkin (it won him the Writers Guild of America award for best screenplay) and it was, in effect, his prototype for The West Wing:

Andrew Shepherd is approaching the end of his first term as President of the United States. He’s a widower with a young daughter and has proved to be popular with the public. His election seems assured. That is until he meets Sydney Ellen Wade, a paid political activist working for an environmental lobby group. He’s immediately smitten with her and after several amusing attempts, they finally manage to go on a date (which happens to be a State dinner for the visiting President of France). His relationship with Wade opens the door for his prime political opponent, Senator Bob Rumson, to launch an attack on the President’s character, something he could not do in the previous election as Shepherd’s wife had only recently died.

Thank you, garykmcd, for that efficient synopsis.

So to President Shepherd’s Big Speech:

There’s a continuation of that speech which precisely defines the Daily Mail smear-technique:

… interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who to blame for it. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.

You gather a group of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family, and American values and character, and you wave an old photo …

See it for yourself:

I’m with President Shepherd, Deputy Leader Harman, and anyone of real decency here.

This way madness lies

This, from the New York Times website:

By age 17, nearly one in five American boys and one in 10 girls has been told that they have A.D.H.D. That comes to 6.4 million children and adolescents — a 40 percent increase from a decade ago and more than double the rate 25 years ago. Nearly 70 percent of these kids are prescribed stimulant medications.

ADHD?

Aw, c’mon! For slow learners, then:

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a group of behavioural symptoms that include inattentiveness, hyperactivity and impulsiveness. Attention deficit disorder (ADD) is a sub-type of ADHD.

Common symptoms of ADHD include:

• a short attention span
• restlessness or constant fidgeting
• being easily distracted

ADHD can occur in people of any intellectual ability. However, many people with ADHD also have learning difficulties. They may also have additional problems such as sleep disorders.

Or, put it like this: as a teacher, you only need the one in your classroom. He may well arrive at school, just come from the confectionary counter, and already dosed up, with his stash of high-octane, high-sugar, high-additives in his bag, just to keep him high. Then, late morning,  he’ll fall asleep — but, then, who makes the connection?

But 20% of American boys?

Most of them on methylphenidate hydrochloride (i.e. Ritalin)?

It’s an analogue (though I won’t defend that loose term) of amphetamine.

Parents, dealing with “difficult” children (and are there any not?) demand it. It is often covered by family health insurance (and the drug-manufacturers have long experience in making sure it is).

And, by many accounts, it simply doesn’t work.

A change in the weather?

There is good news in this NY Times piece:

Too many kids are identified and treated after an initial pediatric visit of 20 minutes or even less. Accurate diagnosis requires reports of impairment from home and school, and a thorough history of the child and family must be taken, to rule out abuse or unrelated disorders.

Yes, this would be more time consuming and costly in the short term. But just like investing in preschool, spending more today on careful diagnosis and treatment of A.D.H.D. will lead to lifetimes of savings. As the early childhood education movement builds, let’s make sure we proceed with caution. We should fundamentally rethink how we diagnose and treat A.D.H.D., especially for our youngest citizens.

I think that amounts to a message for parents and doctors:

Grow Up!