Straight From the Horse's Arse

The Two Cultures: Fifty Years On

2009-05-28T17:30:00.001+01:00

Excellent blog posting by Timothy Sandefur about why we shouldn't forget C. P Snow's message. Half a century has passed since his Rede lecture and the subsequent vicious spat with F. R Leavis. Sandefur explains what really underlay Leavis' attack on Snow's lecture. Well worth fifteen minutes of your time, if you have any opinions whatsoever on the place of science in society.

Oh, the Irony of It!

2009-05-28T16:18:00.001+01:00

I am not a Daily Telegraph reader by habit, mainly because I don't agree with its politics. I will concede that it is a good newspaper that, for a right-wing broadsheet, actually believes in investigative journalism. Unlike, say, the Daily Mail with its daily hymn of hate against dole scroungers, the EU, asylum seekers and other bogeys. I will also concede that it has some good journalists.

One of these journalists was Julie Kirkbride, the Tory MP who was recently exposed by the Telegraph as having used taxpayer's money to fund an extension on her second home. She was one of the 98 MPs who voted to exempt their expense details from the Freedom of Information Act. I seem to remember listening to Ms Kirkbride on a television program years ago, explaining why she wanted to become a Tory MP. It was because she found herself reading and writing Telegraph editorials, finding herself in total agreement with their politics, and wanting to put these politics into action. I wonder if she'd take the same line now.

Tilting at Wind Farms

2009-05-18T10:59:00.011+01:00

We British don't export very much nowadays or even manufacture much that anybody might want to buy. Instead, we seem to concentrate on producing particularly unlovely and undesirable cultural attitudes - a closet hatred of Europe; dislike of refugees fleeing violent and brutal regimes; a particular kind of small-mindedness that arises from a vignetted view of the way the world works – and do our damnedest to export these throughout any part of the world that will listen for long enough.

When the world has stopped listening, then it's pretty certain that there will be a receptive domestic audience, somewhere. One of the most peculiarly British but insidious kinds of small-mindedness was rife in the 1950's and is still thriving today. This particular brand of small mindedness arises from the inability to accept that debatable issues may involve considerations beyond the aesthetic and artistic dimensions. In academic life this opens up a schism, rather like C.P Snow's 'Two Cultures'. At a more mundane and parochial level it leads to communities that are unwilling or simply unable to comprehend that there are stakes involved that are bigger than the view from their dining-room window.

I happen to like polar bears. I think they are magnificent animals, and embody everything that Darwin's wonderful theory of evolution set out to describe. Here you have a powerful, supremely adapted creature living in the harshest of environments but thriving all the same. They are, however, a threatened species, simply because humanity has found novel ways of jeopardising the biodiversity of this planet. As our race has become more technologically capable, we have polluted and poisoned our planet and continue to do so. Global temperatures are rising and pack ice is shrinking, and along with it goes the habitat of the polar bear and many other Arctic Species.

The plight of the polar bear in particular ought to serve as a wake-up-call, because it crystallizes our effect upon our environment. We should understand the damage we are doing to our planet and look to mitigate, halt or even or reverse its impact. One way we can start to do this is by providing more of our energy needs through renewable energy sources, such as hydro, wave power, solar and wind. You would think that nobody could really come up with a rational objection to such an approach. You'd be right, but rationality and objecting often part company when sacrifices become necessary.

So, what kind of sacrifice would you be prepared to make to save the polar bear, the ptarmigan, even the lemming, a creature fabled for its own inability to preserve itself? How about an unspoiled view of the countryside? Surely not too much to ask: we put up with pylons in order to be able to light our homes and access the Internet. Why not a few wind turbines?

This is far too much to ask for the likes of the pressure group Save Our Common Mountain Environment (SOCME). This group has been set up to oppose the construction of a nineteen-turbine wind farm on Mynydd-y-Gwair, north of Swansea, South Wales, right next to where my mother currently lives. The wind farm will provide up to 57 MW of generating capacity, enough to power 28,000 homes, but SOCME bitterly oppose this development. On their website they list pages of objections, some on the basis of noise, efficacy, impact upon biodiversity. However, looking at the website one can see that the most vocal and explicit critics are artists and photographers. I suspect that the real reason that they don't like the idea of a wind farm is because they don't like the look of the things. One of these people even goes so far as to describe them as 'white satanic mills'.

When I look at a wind farm, I don't happen to see the Devil. I see a testament to our resourcefulness as a race, our unique ability to harness our scientific and technological knowledge to the benefit of the entire planet, not just one species. I know that there are thousands of tons of carbon dioxide that won't be polluting the atmosphere for the sake of our lighting and our wide-screen tellies. I acknowledge one of the rare occasions on which we can have our cake and eat it. I don't hear the Devil either, as it happens; I drove up to a wind farm several years ago and could hear nothing until I put my ear smack against a pylon. Ultimately, I see us doing our bit as a nation to address the most imminent and threatening global crisis we have probably ever faced, much more so than the recent collapse of the global banking system.

SOCME are blind to this aspect of wind farm development, I suspect, because their movers and shakers come almost exclusively from one of Snow's 'Cultures' and are incapable of appreciating that there might be another perspective. It has been pointed out that the difference between Art and Science is that Art is about change, whereas Science is about progress. The former is culturally specific and subjective, and the latter is shared. Science allows us to agree on certain truths that apply for all of us: that idea that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere might be bad for the climate, for instance, and this agreement at least gives us a mandate as a species for some effective action. I suspect that SOCME would grudgingly acknowledge such arguments but refuse to engage with them or try to twist them to their own purposes. Take away the centring influence and things soon fall apart. A world of Art and no Science, subject only to the ever-changing whims of the aesthetic perspective, would be as terrible as one of Science and no Art, and if you want to know what it looks like, then SOCME provides a prime example.

We won't be able to replace lost species, but we can demolish wind farms when they have served their purpose and we have limitless and clean energy from fusion power. Until then, however, groups like this should stop being so bloody myopic and actually propose some convincing alternatives to the greater spread of renewable energy sources. Otherwise, I suggest that all clear thinking environmentalists should simply ignore them. I can only speak for myself but wish these closet reactionaries the worst outcome possible in their endeavours to shirk their part of our collective environmental responsibility, and I hope that they keep on being pilloried in films like The Age of Stupid. If they can't show us a way forward then they should get out of our way.

This Blog needs Comments

2009-05-17T07:58:00.002+01:00

...but I can't think of anything significant to say right now. Think I'll just make some gratuitous offensive statements about Apple Macs and the people who use them. Seems to work every time.

'Imagine' a better anthem than this, please

2009-05-09T11:43:00.005+01:00

I've just been re-reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. I think he's right about virtually every issue he takes on in the book, apart from one in particular. John Lennon's Imagine is not a 'superb song', sorry. It's a wretched, scrannel dirge, but by far the worst thing about it is its hypocrisy. Elvis Costello put the boot into the softest part of its anatomy when he sang 'Was it a millionaire who said 'imagine no possessions'?' Quite.

I think we atheists should be able to think of a better anthem than this one. I would propose XTC's Dear God. This at least has the courage to do away with the idea of God without having to sugar the pill with visions of Arcadian bliss. The melody is also a lot more sophisticated and challenging.

Any other suggestions by people willing to risk their immortal soul are welcome.

What is the point of this gesture?

2009-04-28T13:50:00.004+01:00

Somebody has put a petition on the Number 10 website demanding that Gordon Brown should resign.
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/please-go/
I have to say that I have not the faintest idea of what this is meant to achieve. If, as has been rumoured, it was created to allow disgruntled Labour Party members to vent their spleen at the PM, then there are better ways of doing this, such as at the annual Party conference. If it's to get him to make way for another younger leader such as Milliband, one less politically maladroit, less tainted by his term as Chancellor leading up to the current crisis, then it's arguable that a General Election would field a wider range of candidates who might have fresher ideas of their own for running the country.

I tend towards the Left myself, but I know when a party in government has run out of steam, run out of ideas, and could benefit from an extended period of reflection. The trouble is, is that although I see the Opposition building up a huge head of steam, I don't see it generating much in the way of ideas. I'm unlikely to vote for a new Conservative Britain, but I'd like to know what it would look like all the same before I signed up to something like this.

I'm finally beginning to be impressed by this mobile technology lark

2009-04-28T08:46:00.002+01:00

Like many people who work in IT, I'm a complete dinosaur. Mucking about with computers is not my ideal way of spending my free time. I tend to be well behind the times when it comes to gadgets and the suchlike as well.

Because I was a loyal customer of my 'phone company, they offered me a very nice upgrade deal, which was sweetened by one of these. It's good for me because it enables me to keep my calendar handy when I'm out and about, but it also works as a 3G handset and GPS receiver.

Sis-in-law is staying with us right now while she looks for a house locally, after moving up from Northampton. Being unable to go to work right now, I decided to help her house-hunt on Friday afternoon. I have to say that the PDA was a godsend. I installed Google Maps, which works just dandy over a 3G link, and also uses the GPS receiver to home in on your current position. Every time we saw a likely looking house for sale, I could add a marker to the map with comments about it.

What's more, having done this Google Street View can be used to show the area to others, so if you like the look of a street and you want to get the opinion of friends or family, you can simply zoom in on the street and show it in all its glory. Moreover, since sis-in-law wants to walk to the railway station, I can get it to work out distances so she's not beyond a comfortable walking distance.

I expect as time goes on we'll see more examples of high-speed mobile technology actually becoming useful, as opposed to an answer looking for a solution.

Are you a Preservationist or a Sustainable Developer?

2009-04-22T10:15:00.004+01:00

Be careful for what you wish for, it might come true, seems to be the moral of Fred Pearce's report in New Scientist about the Green reaction to the proposed Severn Barrage. Some - Sustainable Developers - think the barrage is a good idea as it could get rid of the need for eight coal-fired power stations, but most - Preservationists - are violently opposed to it because of the potential impact on wildlife.

As for me: I'm a Sustainable Developer. As keen as I am on proper environmental stewardship of the planet, I recognise the need for compromise. Hardcore Greens no doubt use the Internet extensively and heat and light their homes with the same electricity as the rest of us. As I pointed out in an earlier posting, if we want to encourage people to get out of their cars then we'd better start encouraging them to work from home, with all the extra energy costs that it will entail.

To a large extent, Greens have been victims of their own success. Previously they were able to adopt an absolutist position, but now that wider society is beginning to take heed of them and act upon their concerns, they are starting to face the kind of dilemmas that the rest of us have been grappling with for decades. Everything comes at a price, and simply denying that there is an issue around the need for cost effective electricity reminds me, anyway, of Marie Antoinette more than anyone else. But the 'let them eat Energy Efficiency' attitude simply won't cut it anymore. Why should everybody but them be expected to adjust their positions?

Or is it simply that if Greens admit they're happy for once, then they're out of a job?

The New Vocabulary of Malice

2009-04-20T09:36:00.013+01:00

I don't tend to learn new words very often these days. It's because I'm forty-five, and I probably have a vocabulary that is already two- or threefold that of the 'man in the street'. So, when I do come across a new word, I tend to treat it as a newly-discovered gewgaw on a gravel path: to be examined, evaluated, and either pocketed for future use or discarded. Sometimes I come across shiny little gems like 'metonymy': a word I am never likely to use, but that I heard used in a BBC4 documentary series about the northern latitudes of this world.

More often than not, however, I tend to happen across the lexiconic equivalent of a junkie's discarded needle, to be kicked gingerly out of the way with the tip of my boot. One of these words is 'munter', and I came across it in this article about the dumpy little Scottish woman, Susan Boyle, who has caused such a sensation on Britain's Got Talent. It refers to an ugly person and its very contact, let alone usage, leaves one feeling contaminated. To be fair, the author was using it ironically, targetting her ire upon those in the show (including the judges) who dismissed at her from the outset because of the way she looked. Then she opened her mouth to sing and, as we all now know (and some of us knew already), appearances can be deceptive.

Why do I hate words like this? Because they seem to embody a meanness of spirit, a willingness to rush to judge on the basis of appearance. And the word itself is blissfully unaware of its own ugliness. I only saw the YouTube version, but there was one telling camera shot during this clip of a mascara-caked young girl in the audience sneering at Susan during her introduction. Susan will be remembered for her voice, but this girl will now be remembered as 'the one who sneered at Susan Boyle'. What an albatross to have slung around one's marginally-pretty neck.

I don't think we should be surprised that this girl reacted the way she did. In the world of celebrity, packaging is all. Virtually all the notable public figures that this young woman knows about will be on the pages of Heat week after week, famous mainly for being famous. Women in particular are reduced to photographic images, and they all end up looking the same because they've all had the same cosmetic procedures done to them.

But that's where the excuses ought to stop. What is most telling about the BGT audience's initial reaction to Ms. Boyle is that it belied the poverty of its own aspirations, and it has nobody to blame for that except itself. Boyle comes from a musical family, and has no doubt been aware from a very early age where music, and a talent for it, can take you. She has lived on a different plane of existence to the audience, which has probably never aspired to anything much in particular apart from a boob job or getting 'ripped fast'. And the judges should definitely have known better. I personally don't want to live in a world where the most important thing is not to be a 'munter'.

Stupid

2009-04-19T20:54:00.009+01:00

I generally say I started off this blog because I thought of the title and then tried to think of something that would fit it, rather like those journalists who pen a headline 'NUDE BISHOP IN PALACE DRUGS DRAMA!' and then spend the rest of their life trying to find a fitting story. I struck lucky: I came up with the blog.

But, if truth be told, I came up with the idea for a blog before I came up with the title. It was inspired by this guy who sets the timer on his digital camera and runs away, trying to see how far he'll get before the shutter fires. I found the sheer pointlessness of it quite redeeming, and so set about trying to find out how much more pointless I could be with a digital camera and its timer.

Here's the result. The New Regular Feature, a la Alan Partridge, is called Does The Light Go Off?, and will feature pictures taken with and without flash to prove this. These are from our Hotpoint FF200E:

With flash

Without flash

Does the Light Go Off?: coming to a fridge near you. Perhaps nearer than you think...

Green Motoring

2009-04-19T04:58:00.003+01:00

Interesting post here from the BBC's Richard Black, discussing the green merits of various motoring options. There is a very pertinent comment about our emissions total:

Transport accounts for about 28% of the whole, and road transport for about
85% of that quarter.

Instead of encouraging people to drive greener vehicles, shouldn't we be looking at alternatives to getting in the car in the first place? Encouraging flexible working would appear to be such an alternative. There is no real reason why many people should not now work from home, given that the infrastructure now exists to enable this.

Sceptical control-freak managers should read this BT report indicating how productivity has gone up and absenteeism and staff turnover have plummeted. The worker wins, the company wins, and the environment wins. Bit of a no-brainer, really.

Contemporary

2009-04-17T20:28:00.002+01:00

Nottingham is quite well served for high culture. We have the Royal Concert Hall, the Playhouse, the Royal Theatre, some interesting museums, possibly one of the world's best cinemas: all facilities I use fairly regularly. One thing we haven't had is a decent art gallery.

This is about to change. Getta loada this new building, the Nottingham Contemporary. It's been built up the arse end of one of the ugliest parts of Nottingham, the Broadmarsh Centre. I'm not sure whether it's attractive. It's certainly bold and striking, and it's a hell of a lot bigger than it looks.

I quite like modern art. I'm not sure I understand a lot of it. Mind you, I don't understand Gregorian Chant either but that's easy on the ear. When this place opens I shall write some more about it. In the meantime, I'd be intrigued to see how long that graffiti-magnet of lace-patterned concrete walls stays unblemished.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Bugger-All: Update

2009-04-17T10:05:00.001+01:00

As if to prove my point about tedious and formulaic writing on h2g2, today's Front Page carries a link to this entry:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A48813735

I wonder if certain people ask themselves why they bother getting up in the morning.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Bugger-All

2009-04-16T11:54:00.000+01:00

George Orwell is, in my opinion anyway, the greatest essayist in the English language. He is also one of its most depressing novelists. I first read 1984 when I was eighteen and when I had finished the book I vowed never to pick it up again. About ten years later I gave George another chance, and read Coming Up for Air, finding it equally depressing but in a different sort of way. Rather like 1984’s Winston Smith its protagonist, the forty-five year old George ‘Tubby’ Bowling, goes up against insurmountable historical forces. In Bowling's case it isn’t the increasingly finely engineered malice of the totalitarian state towards the individual, rather a casual indifference emerging from what once would have been called ‘progress’. But, like Smith, he ends up being utterly crushed by it.

Bowling has a small windfall after a flutter on the gee-gees and decides to spend a weekend away from his termagant of a wife and his family, revisiting some old childhood haunts in his home village of 'Lower Binfield'. When he gets there, he finds the place unrecognisable. Everything has changed: the local where he stays; his family home, now a tea shop; his old girlfriend, to whom age has not been kind. The final disappointment takes the form of a secluded pond full of carp where he fished as a child, and is now a rubbish dump. Nostalgia, in George’s case, certainly wasn’t what it used to be.

Another overweight 45-year-old decided to go on a nostalgia trip of his own over the Easter weekend and ended up having much the same experience as George. Except, this time, he didn’t even have to leave his house, which was a good thing as a nasty operation had left him pretty much housebound. Instead he decided to visit one of his online haunts, the BBC’s h2g2 ‘community’. H2g2, in case you don’t know, was set up in 1999 by the late great Douglas Adams during the dot-com boom as a realization of the central idea behind his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. Adams, very much a visionary, felt that the technology underlying the Internet was mature enough to make the concept of a real-time electronic guidebook to real life, written by ordinary people, a practicable proposition.

Initially, when the Internet business domain was awash with money, such a guide might have made a fair amount of money if it could attract readers (and therefore advertisers). As we all know, this wasn’t to be the case. The Internet bubble, predicated on there being an unlimited pool of advertising revenue, burst rather predictably. H2g2 along with countless other new online ventures went bust, and Adams was forced to find another partner. In this case, the BBC was interested in using the underlying technology as a ‘community engine’. They bought out h2g2 lock, stock and barrel. The h2g2 community, mainly amateur authors like me, dutifully trooped over to the new h2g2. We accepted that new masters were in charge that had different priorities and standards but carried on contributing all the same.

Up to this point it was fair to say that h2g2 was thriving. Authors mainly wrote about places and experiences they wanted to share with others. In contrast some, like me, tried to inject a little bit of zest into topics that might otherwise have been regarded as dryly factual, such as artists’ pigment and road cats eyes. We wrote because we enjoyed writing, we wanted others to enjoy reading, and because we ultimately wanted to enjoy being read. This enthusiasm was tangible: in the early years, every day brought at least ten new h2g2 ‘Edited Guide entries’ that jostled for prominence. The ultimate accolade was to be accorded Editor’s 'Pick of the Day': you got your entry decorated with a very nice piece of in-house generated artwork, known as a ‘blob’. Even though I say so myself, I was a damned good writer and managed to collect quite a few of these blobs, adorning my 'Personal Space' on h2g2 like so many trophy heads on a country squire's wall.

As is well known, Adams died tragically at the young age of 49 after suffering a heart attack, not long after the BBC took over. The BBC, loyal as ever to its protégés, sustained and underwrote Adams’ vision of an ever growing guide to Life, the Universe and Everything. So, ten years on, how has h2g2 fared?

The answer is ‘not well’. I visited the site for the first time in a year on Sunday. There were three entries that day. Two of them, true to the BBC’s traditional holiday scheduling, were ‘repeats’, first published in 2004 and 2005. The sole remaining entry was a deconstruction of the meaning of the parking sign ‘Gates in Constant Use’, being a rather clumsy attempt to capture the digressive style of one of Adams wry musings on the iniquities of life. It wasn’t particularly funny or well-written, and didn’t tell you anything you wanted to know in the first place. Is this really the best kind of factual writing that anyone can think of?

One might also ask why our license is fee supporting this kind of deeply self-indulgent writing. To be honest, I’ve found the BBC’s commitment to this project questionable at the best of times. Given h2g2's current state of health, a tenure as one of the few paid members of the Editorial team, the ‘Italics’, might be seen more as a stepping stone to a lucrative career in web publishing than anything else. So, one cannot avoid forming the impression that these people are less concerned about actually publishing something of use than having a quiet life. . As for the volunteers, who make up the vast bulk of the community, very few of them actually merit the title of ‘Field Researcher for the Guide’, in that they seldom if ever get off their arses, visit places, restaurants, cinemas, galleries and the suchlike, and then write about them. Being brutally honest about my own contributions, I can’t claim that they embodied this spirit either. There are one or two notable exceptions, such as this estimable lady who has contributed far more than I ever will and actually seems to be writing about her own experiences.

But, on the whole, people who still contribute do so out of some sense of duty or because they want to be regarded as being a big fish in a very small pond. George Bowling would recognise this pond now as it is increasingly filling up with the sort of material that would have been discarded by other more discerning sites. I think the rot started to set in when some authors thought that quantity of output mattered more than quality. To be able to claim that having 100 or more Edited Guide entries to your name was seen as a major achievement by some. No matter that these articles were increasingly lazy, tedious and formulaic in nature. This kind of thinking reached its nadir with a series of line-by-line deconstructions of novelty songs that had long been forgotten, mainly because they were simply lists of people, places or events. The actual subject matter was dredged up to serve the format, which had become an object of primary importance: Tail, meet Dog. It was nothing more than 'Writing By Numbers' and, worse, belied a total lack of a sense of a broader audience by a community far too pleased with itself. So, as h2g2 approaches its tenth birthday, I have some well-meant words of advice for it.

Firstly: don’t try to compete with sites like Wikipedia. H2g2 shouldn’t be a repository for the total sum of human knowledge. Neither should Wikipedia for that matter but both sites do different things and should play to their strengths.

Secondly: Evolve or die. H2g2 needs to rediscover its distinctive voice. Stop trying to be all things to all people. There is a niche for a comprehensive online publication that encourages opinionated, spiky writing about real world experience. Ordinary people like to know what others actually think about places, people, films, art galleries, visitor attractions and the suchlike. H2g2 ought to make an attempt to reach out to readers who would not otherwise have given it a second glance. It can achieve this goal simply by developing a sense of audience beyond its current catchment.

Thirdly, and finally: keep Douglas Adams' vision alive, but let the man himself rest in peace. He was a very funny man and one of a kind, but he would have seen h2g2 as a starting point for encouraging people to go out and enjoy life, not as an end in itself. His spectre nevertheless seems to haunt h2g2's current writing, and a very pale thing it is indeed. The very last thing he could have wished was for its authorship to end up aping his own.

The Murky World of Political Blogging

2009-04-14T21:51:00.000+01:00

If you've been living on Mars for the past week, with your head encased in a block of concrete and with a towel wrapped around it, then you might be unaware of the furore regarding murky allegations made about senior Opposition Members in the UK Parliament. The story, as far as I can gather was that a Downing Street aide was circulating scurrilous and false allegations about the shadow cabinet via emails. Damian McBride resigned after unfounded claims about David Cameron and other senior figures were revealed: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7998671.stm . These claims were due to be made public in a blog called Red Rag.

Now, knowingly saying untrue things about prominent public figures is simply not acceptable, and Mr. McBride was right to lose his job. Yet, it seems to me that this is simply another battlefront that has been opened up in a war that has raged for years in the press, and now on the Internet. It used to be the case that a politician would meet a journalist from a tame newspaper, say a few highly questionable things about individuals, and then these statements would appear on the front page of the newspaper, after the lawyers had given them a good going over first.

The press in Britain has been traditionally right wing: for many newspapers, when a general election comes around, nothing but a Conservative government will do. Moreover, many politicians have habitually conjugated the verb 'to smear' as 'you smear, he leaks, I inform the public'. It seems to me anyway, that this new development is a novel form of guerrilla warfare that is taking place away from the traditional battlefield of the Commons/press/dining club. It doesn't make it right, and it should stop, but the pleading of moral outrage from those who have extensively used the traditional routes of dissemination of propaganda, and will continue to do so, rings rather hollow in such a feral and biased climate.

The First Post: the Shadowy World of Childhood Culture

2009-04-12T10:34:00.000+01:00

Don't worry, this isn't a rant about how sinister commercial forces are trying to take over the mind of our children. It's a lot more innocent (and hopefully interesting) than that. I was chatting to my eleven year old daughter in the garden the other day and she was reciting to me a song she learned in the playground.

It took me straight back to my primary school days. There was a song I remembered about one's old man being a lavatory cleaner (these are primary school kids remember), and this had been passed on from child to child since time immemorial. There were countless versions of it.

It then got me wondering about there being a parallel track of 'culture' running alongside what we adults tend to regard as the authoritative version. We have stories and songs encoded in an ever-growing variety of media. Kids, on the other hand have a more limited set of choices for communicating and recording, but they have their own little cultural artifacts, sometimes stories, songs, jokes, games etc. that are passed on through play and simple conversation. When we become adults, we forget all these.

So, most of this 'shadow culture' exists only in the minds of children. Much of it is frivolous, but some of it serves an additional useful purpose. I grew up on the edge of the countryside and often used to play with kids who lived on farms. We noticed that these children had their own 'lore' about which wild plants were poisonous and which were safe. Often these observations were dressed up in tall stories about sprouting wings or warts if you ate them, but we soon knew what to avoid. If we returned home with stained fingers, our parents knew it was almost certainly blackberry juice, and not honeysuckle or deadly nightshade.

So, next time your kid comes home from the playground reciting a newly-learned ditty, listen to them. It might save your life one day.

Welcome to the Horse's Arse

2009-04-04T13:45:00.000+01:00

I don't know why I've started this blog. Perhaps I have too much free time on my hands. Anyway, you should be able to gather from its title of that virtually all the information I publish will be of dubious provenance and highly unreliable. This stops me from having to pretend that in having a blog, I am trying to fulfil a higher social purpose. And it prevents you from pretending that, in reading it, you are doing yourself some good, intellectually, morally or spiritually.

Anyway, when I think of something important or meaningful to say I will publish it here. Until then, get used to the usual opinionated bollocks you can read anywhere else.