The Virtual Stoa

Duncan Hallas, Socialist Worker, born 23 December 1925, died 19 September 2002.

Friends of the Republican Calendar: note that we’re cycling through the end-of-year holidays prior to Year CCXIV beginning on (Gregorian) 22 September.

Over here, with a very fine photograph.

UPDATE [11.30pm]: This is almost too exciting: from the Daily Pilot:

NEWPORT BEACH — The harbor commission voted Wednesday to suspend the mooring permit for a barge used to raise white sea bass in Newport Harbor.During the same meeting, the board voted to move forward with new rules designed to discourage sea lions from living in the harbor. The commission considered ordinances that would make it illegal to feed wild animals, such as sea lions and to discard items, especially fish remains, into the harbor.

Harbor resources supervisor Chris Miller said the commission favored additional provisions to the rules pertaining to fishing vessels. Harbor commissioners Tim Collins, Seymour Beek and Ralph Rodheim are set to meet next week to fine tune the ordinances before they are considered by the City Council…

I was wondering whether he’d get a proper job.

Livio Maitan, Italian revolutionary socialist, born 1 April 1923, died 16 September 2004, one year ago today.

Victor Jara, Chilean socialist songman, born 23 September 1932, murdered about 16 September 1973 in the repression following the coup of 11 September.

Finally, the military brought Victor Jara and other political prisoners to the Stadium of Chile, the place where the concert for Allende has previously been held. There the military men tortured and killed many people. They broke Victor Jara’s hands … so that he couldn’t play his guitar, and then taunted him to try and sing and play his songs. Even under these horrible tortures, Victor Jara magnificently sang a portion of the song of the Popular Unity party. After this, he received many brutal blows, and finally was brutally killed with a machine gun and carried to a mass grave.

There’s more on his songs here.

Osugi Sakae, Japanese anarchist, born 17 January 1885, killed by police after the Great Kanto Earthquake, 16 September 1923.

Also Ito Noe, Japanese anarchist and feminist, born 21 January 1895, killed by police after the Great Kanto Earthquake, 16 September 1923.

I like living with kittens. Like many of the finest things, they make life more serious and more frivolous at the same time, which is a tremendous double-action. Anyway: here’s Andromache, taking an interest in books:

And here’s Enkidu, lord of all he surveys, thinking about whether to learn a major European language:

I’m still hoping to get a good Andromache-up-a-tree photo, but it’s raining outside, and I don’t want to get wet.

The post below reminds me on an encounter I had almost exactly ten years ago, shortly after moving to the US. I was sitting on the T in Boston reading a copy of the Federalist, and a man in a hat turned and said to me, “Federalist Ten, Madison on faction — that’s my favourite,” and I thought what a great republic this is, where people exchange the numbers of their favourite Federalist Papers on the subway.

Just got back from a curry just around the corner. I was sat at one table reading a book about Leibniz. The couple at the next table were busy refuting Locke.

The Royal Mail is issuing three commemorative stamps to mark England’s victory to win back the Ashes. One of them will be a 68p stamp — the cost of a letter to Australia…

My friend Hamish Nixon has a piece about the elections in Afghanistan over at OpenDemocracy.

On the whole, I’ve liked both copies of the new-look Guardian that I’ve seen (though agree with those who think that the masthead is a bit crappy: why not go the whole hog and replace theguardian with guardian or guardian.co.uk while you’re at it?). But I always thought that hiring Simon Jenkins as the replacement for Hugo Young was a foolish idea, and his first column turns out, surprise surprise, to be rubbish nonsense.

Michael Vaughan says:

“As a team and players, we had a lot of self-belief that we could turn things around, and we also have a lot of self-belief we can do very well in the World Cup come 2007 - that is when we will be judged.”

Bollocks. The World Cup in 2007 doesn’t matter much. It’d be a nice bonus to win it, but that’s all. England’s cricketers will be judged by sensible people (i.e. me, and people who think like me) far more by how they perform against Pakistan and India this Winter, against India and Sri Lanka next Summer, and, above all, in the Ashes series of 2006-7 in Australia.Actually, I like Michael Vaughan a lot. He bats well, and is incapable of disguising his mood when he’s on telly.

I still think we should have a Twenty:Twenty world cup, though, played over a week or so with each country playing twice a day. That’d be fun.

Can it possibly be true, as my copy of last year’s Wisden that my mum gave me last week suggests, that the West Indies aren’t touring England again until 2010? That’s disgraceful.

Presumably one of the issues facing the selectors for the Winter tour is to find ways of including Ian Bell and Geraint Jones in the squad — since it’d be tricky to drop players who featured in all five Ashes Tests — but then come up with excuses not to play them in the Test Matches, so their replacements can be settled in the side in good time for next Summer’s Tests? We really shouldn’t be playing people who look like twelve year-olds in the side, especially when they aren’t good enough at what it is that they are supposed to be doing. Maybe when they’re bigger.

Over on the BBC website at the moment is a lovely, crazy story, “Liam Fox has accused Conservative leadership front-runner Kenneth Clarke of undermining the morale of British troops in Iraq”.

Is the Dr. Fox strategy to be aggressively stupid in order to try to win support amongst the Tory grassroots? Alternatively, does he think that any publicity is good publicity, and so if saying crazy things is the way to get it, that’s the way to go? Or am I missing some alternative alternative?

(I also liked the headline “Rifkind Unveils Leadership Team” until I realised he was just giving the world the list of people who are bold enough to back his bid for the Tory leadership, rather than making the mistake of playing Fantasy Cabinet-Making in public.)

When I was thinking about what I’d do if I were Ricky Ponting last night, I thought I’d aim to declare when scores were about level, in order to have as long as possible to have a bowl at England. But then I thought that Ponting’s shown himself to be a pretty unimaginative captain this Ashes, and he’s unlikely to want to do that. Now I see that, with the light improving, England are going into bat with the scores about level and a lot of time left in the game. Have England’s bowlers - with Flintoff leading the way - been doing Ponting’s work for him?

UPDATE [2.20PM] OK, so the light wasn’t improving.

Around the same time that we acquired two small kittens, we also decided that would get a daily newspaper delivered, too, and after discussions, we settled on Le Monde. On the whole, it’s been a good read, surprising me from time to time with in-depth features on, for example, Tom Jones’s Sex Bomb, and with far more coverage of Martinique, French Canada and parts of North Africa than you tend to get in the UK papers. The great lack is that there hasn’t been much on the Ashes this Summer, which you would have thought any major journal of record would have wanted to cover at some length. But no, nothing — until today’s paper (or, rather, the paper with today’s date on it, that was published in Paris around lunchtime yesterday). Now, on the front page we can read about the “exploits d’Andrew Flintoff, star de la batte, qui a chassé le footballeur David Beckham de son piédestal” or Kevin Pietersen, with his “tatouage sur le biceps des trois lions de l’équipe d’Angleterre”, and learn important details about the game, such as the fact that a wicket is “une sorte de trépied”, which isn’t how I’ve ever really thought of it, but I suppose it makes sense. It’s all very fine, except for this detail: cricket, we are told, is a game “proche du base-ball”. Grr.

I hadn’t realised that, among his many other correspondents, Keith Flett spends his time writing to Test Match Special. While waiting for play to start at 11, after morning rain, the commentators have just read aloud his recent missive, which challenges the opinion of BBC weatherman (and, if memory serves, beardie) John Kettley. Apparently he has argued that the ball swings largely owing to meteorological factors, but the BLF insists that the ball swings better when heavy humid overcast conditions are combined with hirsute bowlers. “John Kettley has given only half the story”.

“There’s nothing to do right now but grow a beard”, says one of the commentators, possibly Graeme Fowler. Let’s hope play starts soon, and that the Aussies don’t go off when a cloud passes over the sun, if there’s any sun. (Test Match cricket in September in England is, in fact, a stupid idea. Presumably the assumption when the fixture was arranged was that the Ashes would have been decided by Old Trafford, and what happened after that didn’t really matter.)

Gerrard Winstanley, English Digger, b. 1609, d. 10 September 1676. There’s some useful stuff on the Diggers collected here, with links to some of the classic tracts.

St George’s Hill is in large part given over to golf nowadays, which is sad.

Over here:

“His bio, the White House press release, and a number of sources list him as assistant city manager in Edmund, Okla.,” Miranda says. ” When we called the folks in Edmund, they told us that, no, his position in fact had been assistant to the city manager…

No, I wouldn’t put Gareth in charge of mopping up after hurricanes, either.

I haven’t written anything on this blog so far about New Orleans, as I don’t think I have anything particular to say, beyond the usual reactions of appalled horror and despair in the face of the immense loss of human life and the destruction of one of the world’s great cities. But (in keeping with my recent interest in animal life) I am pleased to read that the Audubon Zoo, which I visited in November 1998 on my only visit to New Orleans, has escaped serious damage.

It’s good zoo, with a speciality in unusually white animals, entertainingly enough for a zoo in the Deep South. (The white tigers are exceptionally stylish beasts.) And the zoo was in the international news shortly before the hurricane hit as the home of the kittens of the cloned wildcats. (You might remember seeing the cute pictures in the UK papers, even if you didn’t remember that they were born in New Orleans.)

When Katrina hit, a few flamingos copped it, a raccoon went missing, a couple of otters have died (the excellent Monterey Bay aquarium is giving temporary accommodation to surviving New Orleans otters and penguins), and - rather alarmingly, to my mind - an alligator has escaped, but in general reports of damage are slight. (There’s a handy article here, which reports that the Komodo dragon is just fine.)

Is it appalling that the animals are being better looked after than a lot of the people? Yes it is. (See every other blog in the world for extensive discussion of government failure in NO, LA and the USA.) But that’s not going to stop me celebrating both the good fortune of the zoo and the efforts of those who have devoted themselves to keeping a remarkable collection of animals going in what must be very difficult circumstances indeed, and looking forward to my next visit.

The BBC TMS commentators are chatting away about how the Oval was once kitted out as a prisoner-of-war camp (though never actually used as one). The New Orleans Superdome and the Houston Astrodome have recently been used for disaster-relief. General Pinochet found alternative uses for the Santiago national stadium, the Taliban used to hold public executions at the Kabul football stadium, and the French police used the V�lodrome d’Hiver for the mass round-up of Jews for deportation in July 1942.

Please post other examples of historically interesting, important or disturbing uses of sports facilities in the comments.

Someone has just visited the VS after searching for “melanie phillips stoicism”…

… In other Stoic-related news, I’ve just started reading philosophy professor and occasional blog commenter Tad Brennan’s new book The Stoic Life, and I think it’s going to be really very good indeed.

(I’ll hold off deciding whether it’s splendid until I’ve made it through to the end.)

P.S. Google gives 425 records for “melanie phillips stoicism”, but an impressive 29,700 for “melanie phillips barking”. But then the proof of how misleading these things can be comes with the further stat that “melanie phillips sensible” garners a whopping 55,700.

This week’s drama (and source of anxiety) has been the kittens’ first forays into the outside world. I wanted to get a picture of Andromache up a tree, as she’s quite the tree-climber, but when I was in the garden with the camera, they were just messing around on the lawn.

(I also wanted to get a picture of the Sinclair C5 that somebody parked on the roof of a car around the corner, but it had disappeared by the time I showed up to take the pic.)

Here’s Andromache, then, in the open air:

And Enkidu is on the prowl:

If you haven’t yet read the handy advice for modern living being offered on the English folksong thread at Making Light, then you probably should.