The Virtual Stoa

Mine is to eat more butter. Happily, this is a resolution that won’t depend on will power alone, as we’ve just acquired one of those bread-making machines, which means there’ll be a lot more bread around the house than usual, which means more toast, which means more opportunities to  smother things in butter.

We begin the New Year in the traditional manner…

Louis-Auguste Blanqui, French insurrectionary socialist. Pic of his grave here. More info here, with some original texts handily archived here. Born 8 February 1805, died 1 January 1881.

There are various reasons why there hasn’t been much ( = anything) here recently. One of them is that my hard drive self-destructed last week — and one consequence of that is that if you sent me any email between 11 and 18 December, you might like to send it again if you ever want to receive any kind of reply…

Oh, and if anyone knows where to get a transcript of the Pope’s recent ruminations on gender, please post a link in the comments. Usually vatican.va is pretty good about this kind of thing, but glancing through the site this morning I found next year’s new year’s message and his recent attempt to engage the world’s Hindus in some kind of conversation, but nothing about trannies.

(He’s had a public debate with Jürgen Habermas, hasn’t he? I don’t see why he shouldn’t go head to head with Judith Butler. It’d be great on YouTube, esp. if he showed up to discuss gender performativity in a dress.)

[Normal service to resume eventually.]

One hundred today [via].

It’s not often we have a genuine celebrity visiting the comments boxes at the Virtual Stoa, especially now it’s in it’s post-only-once-a-month-or-thereabouts mode (sorry about that, these things happen), but Mike Chubb — the man who invented the Winterval, no less — just dropped by to comment on the Winterval-themed thread below, and because his remarks address important Winterval-related issues, I’m rescuing them from the obscurity of the comments thread and posting them over the fold. Oxford’s WinterLight event is on Friday: they’re going to re-open Bonn Square and stick up a funny solar system in Broad Street, or something. (Details over here.) And continue on for Mike Chubb’s thoughts on his magnificent creation…

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Over here.

The nuclear option is still on the table, over here [via].

Why do Americans have to queue for so long to cast their votes? Is it just another aspect of the general American concern to make it tricky to cast a vote that’s been kicking around for quite a while now, or is there something else going on that I don’t know about? Or do the press just pick up on the long queues in some particularly inefficient parts of the country, even though most Americans can just pop along to the local polling station and cast a ballot in a minute or two, as in the rest of the democratic world? From my memory of living over there ten years ago, Americans don’t much like queuing. Not like us Brits, anyway.

Here, and here.

The fascists in the British National Party have declared November to be White History Month.

From the Onion’s 2003 archives: White History Year Resumes.

Well, almost. They’re calling it the “Winter Light Festival“, but deep down we all know it’s the Winterval. Cue the usual. Oxford Mail readers share their opinions here, and a thread’s getting going at the Daily Mail here. I think the Winterval is great.

As Simon points out in the comments to the post immediately below this one, there is confusion in ministerial ranks as to whether we are, in fact, going to be having a British Values Day after all. This page of the BBC is currently headlined “British Day idea ‘is still alive’”, but yesterday the same page was far gloomier about the future of British Values Day (more in line with this kind of report). Perhaps confusion about whether to have a Day on which to celebrate British Values is, in fact, a British Value? In other British-Values-Day-related news, I’m delighted to report that the Virtual Stoa is the top Google hit on the entire interweb for those searching for information about BVD, which is as it should be.

There’s nothing new about Scouts getting sex education; Baden Powell wanted to include a passage on “continence” in the first edition of Scouting for Boys, but it was removed on the advice of the publisher. I’ve transcribed it from the appendix to Elleke Boehmer’s edition over the fold.

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Maureen Dowd does Latin; Mary Beard comments [via PR].

Enkidu was on the local news today, filmed trotting across the boatyard site, and looking magnificent.

You can see him, for a bit at least, over at the BBC South Today page: click to watch the “BBC Oxford News”, and he appears one minute and seven seconds into the report. Philip Pullman is on immediately after Enkidu, but it’s a bit of a let down as he lacks the natural screen presence of the black-and-white cat.

Good news. Oxford Mail, here; full decision (not too long) here. Roughly speaking, the inspector agreed that it was reasonable to think that the 50% affordable housing requirement should have been relaxed on the development site, but wasn’t entirely happy with what would be available on the waterside, and really didn’t like the designs.

Gordon Brown was first elected to Parliament in 1983.

Here’s what the Labour Party’s manifesto that year had to say about the banks… [via]

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The second annual Ewen Green Memorial Lecture, “Empire and the turn to collectivism in English social policy, c. 1880-1914″, will be given by Professor Miles Taylor (Director, The Institute of Historical Research, London) on Tuesday 14 October 2008 at 5.00pm, Magdalen College Auditorium (entrance in Longwall Street). Drinks afterwards.

(In a different and better world, Thursday 16th would have been Ewen’s 50th birthday.)

NUTRITION PRIZE. Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.

REFERENCE: “The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips,” Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence, Journal of Sensory Studies, vol. 19, October 2004,  pp. 347-63.

The full list of winners is here.

Get your cards over here! [thanks JQ/DA]

Over here (he is in favour).

Everywhere I look I see discussions of British politics cast in terms of “narratives”. Has anyone written anything interesting about this? And do people think this language is at all useful, or is it just the current buzzword that functions as a substitute for thinking about things but which allows commentators to signal that they’re keeping up with the crowd? Does anyone know when it started, or why? And is it mostly a British thing, or are the Americans, French, Canadians, Belgians and Poles banging on about narratives in their politics, too?

Ted Vallance has a piece up at the New Statesman website. You can tell he’s a man of sound judgment, as he labels Liam Byrne’s recent pamphlet, “An atrociously written piece of invidious nonsense.”

“Plans for a railway line linking Oxford and Cambridge have moved a step closer after £2m of government funding was allocated to the project.” Excellent news. [Over here.]