Category: History

Goodnight and see you tomorrow

Today I got up at 7am, worked on and off on a big piece of writing, then dined at Chateau Samizdata, out west, and am now back here, as in home, having not done anything here, as in at this blog.

Here is a photo chosen from the archives, pretty much at random:

Taken in March 2012, i.e. six years ago, when the Shard was just being finished. Taken from out east, beside the Victoria Docks.

And now I will go to bed, and get up just as early tomorrow morning as I was up today, and I will finish that big piece of writing. I promise this. That’s the plan, anyway. One thing is for sure. I am in no state to finish it now.

Goodnight and see you tomorrow.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

ENO Traviata dress rehearsal

Yesterday GodDaughter2 arranged for me to accompany her and and a selection her singing student friends to a dress rehearsal of the ENO’s La Traviata. Like every show at the E(nglish) NO, It was sung in English. It was also somewhat strangely directed, as operas tend to be nowadays. So, the students were all grumbling afterwards. What were those peculiar gestures the soprano kept on doing? “Such torture” to have listen to it in English!

As for me, my problems were that we were the usual third of a mile up and away in the sky (but with no windows through which I might have taken photos of London’s Things), and I couldn’t properly see what was happening down there in the distance, beyond the woman in front of me’s head and those brass railings that she was able crouch down and look under. I wasn’t bothered by all the strange “acting” that the singers were apparently doing, because I could hardly see it. It was all I could do to decypher the English crib (and thank goodness for that) above the stage, of what they were singing (in English also (but as often as not you still can’t make out the damn words (because of how they sing them))). But the music, by Giuseppe Verdi, which I knew only as a random bunch of tunes that I had just about quarter-heard before, is so good that I was kept constantly entertained. Plus, I understood enough of what was going on to really enjoy it, and to really learn something.

It’s quite a story. A young woman (the Traviata of the title) is trying to juggle short-term pleasure with and against long-term romantic fulfilment, is fretting about whether her true love can truly be depended upon, but also doesn’t want to get her true love into social trouble because of her lurid past causing everyone to think he could have done better, which will dishonour his entire family and make his younger sister much less marriageable. Plus, she is not in the best of health and has to keep seeing a doctor.

I can remember, way back in the sixties, when it was believed that all that social pressure stuff was dead in the water. Plus of course, in the sixties, everyone was far too young to be having any health problems. Girls could shack up with guys and have consequence-free sex, and then live happily ever after with … whoever. I think I remember thinking, even at the time: well, we’ll see. And it turns out that young girls can now be “ruined” a lot like they were in olden times, that “society” has not gone away, that people still get ill, even sometimes ill because of sex, and that La Traviata is still bang up to date.

The Father of the Traviata’s True Love very much wants True Love to stop being Traviata’s True Love, and begs Traviata to give him up. For the ENO, yesterday, this Father was sung by Alan Opie. He was especially good. A bloke had come on at the beginning and said that, what with this being only a dress rehearsal, some of the singers might be holding back a bit, saving it for the real show. But you could definitely tell that Opie was the real deal.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Assorted Twitterings

I follow Tom Holland because I have liked several of his books (especially Persian Fire), and because I often agree with him, as when he says things like this:

The assumption in Europe that its brand of colonialism was uniquely awful is, in a perverse way, one of the last hold-outs of eurocentrism.

Very true.

Via Tom Holland, I came upon this, from Anthony McGowan:

I came across a place called Strood. I looked it up (having no idea where or what it was), I found this achingly poignant statement: “Strood was part of Frindsbury until 1193, but now Frindsbury is considered part of Strood.”

It’s the implication that “now”, in the Strood/Finsbury part of the world, began in 1193 that makes this so entertaining. I guess they have long memories out there in the not-London part of Britain.

Anthony McGowan is someone I don’t agree with a lot of the time (here is what I think about that). But, I also liked this:

An article about the history of the Chinese typewriter. One old machine had a strange pattern, as some characters had been polished by over-use. It belonged to a Chinese-American immigrant. “The keys that glitter with use are: emigrant, far away, urgent, longing, hardship, dream”.

McGowan doesn’t supply links to where he got these intriguing titbits, which I don’t like. But despite that and other similarly nitpicky nitpicks on my part, Twitter is working, for me. At present I have no plans to depend upon it to say things, although that may change, for I am too distrustful of its increasing political bias. But it is supplying me with much more stuff to be thinking about and writing about.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Wartime Encryption for Pigeons

As a Blackadder fan, I have long known about the use of pigeons during World War 1, to send messages. Pigeons like the one in this photo:

Twitter caption:

War Pigeons were very effectively deployed in the First World War. For instance, they carried messages, like the one being attached to a pigeon by Austro-Hungarian soldiers on the Isonzo Front, which can be seen in this picture.

Quite so. But what made me decide to post the above photo here was this exchange, in the comments.

“Liagson”:

Were they normally encrypted?

Wayne Meyer:

They used WEP. Wartime Encryption for Pigeons. It was a very early wireless standard.

Blog and learn. Not only did I just discover that pigeon messages were – of course, they’d have to have been – encrypted. I also learned that you can link directly to individual Twitter comments.

And what better way could there to learn about the activities of birds than via Twitter?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A talk by me to Libertarian Home

I gave a talk to Libertarian Home early in 2015, entitled What is the Libertarian Movement for?, and it is now up at the Libertarian Home website. A more accurate title for what I ended up saying would be more like: What the libertarian movement is and how to be part of it. It is more about how to do libertarianism than about why to do it, although that is implied.

What I said hasn’t dated in the time since then, and this was one of the better speaking performances I’ve done, I think. Certainly better than the most recent talk I gave, at Christian Michel’s on the subject of causation, about which, it turned out, I had very little more to say than this. Memo to self: now that the cold snap has ended, get a haircut. I have reached the age when I need to keep my hair short, the way it was in this video. The tramp look makes me look too much like a tramp.

My thanks to Jordan Lee for supplying a written summary of what I said.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Creature photos

A frog outside a supermarket in Brixton – a lion outside some flats off Sloane Square – a swan family at Alton in Hampshire – a sign at Battersea Park station – another swan at Walthamstow Wetlands – an octopus in a shop window – Boudicca’s horse – a book about WW2 I must remember to get on Amazon – the horses on top of the Hippodrome next to Leicester Square tube:

This posting started out with just the top of the Hippodrome, and then I thought, I’ll add some other carbon-based-organism-angled photos, of which there were a few more that I thought I’d include. But getting up to a convenient nine photos took longer than I expected. It turns out I don’t photo creatures as often I thought I did, and as interestingly as I thought I did.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

But are we any happier?

A tweet reminded me about this wonderful rant from Louis CK:

That’s the version of it, with dots inserted by him, that Steven Pinker quotes in his new book about the Enlightenment.

Pinker is concerned to explain why increasing affluence doesn’t seem to make everyone ecstatically happy. Deidre McCloskey, in her Bourgeois trilogy, is fond of talking about how the Great Enrichment has made regular people as of now nearly three thousand percent richer. So, why aren’t we three thousand percent happier? Because we don’t seem to be.

Lots of reasons. First, you are happy not according to your absolute level of affluence, but rather according to how affluent you get to be and how meaningful your life gets to be compared to what you were expecting, and compared to how well everyone else seems to be doing, because that tells you how well you could reasonably have expected to do yourself. You may well have been raised to expect quite a lot. Second, although technology hurtles along, for most this hurtling is both pleasing and rather unsettling, the less of the former and the more of the latter as time goes by. We don’t experience, in our one little life, how much better things like Twitter are than is looking after cows, out of doors, all year round, with not enough food or heating. What we experience, as we get older, is how confusing things like Twitter are, or alternatively, if we ignore something like Twitter, how demoralising it is that it has defeated us and denied us its benefits. Or how tedious air travel is, compared to what we’d hoped for rather than compared to a horse drawn wagon in a desert. Yes, I live three thousand percent better than that wretched cowherd three hundred years ago, and if a time machine took away my life and gave me his life, I’d be three thousand percent more miserable. But that’s not the same as me being three thousand percent happier than he was. Happier, yes, definitely. But not by that much.

It’s because we don’t feel that much happier that Louis CK has to rant, to remind us of how lucky we are. And that Steven Pinker has to write his book, to make the same point.

But what if progress continues to hurtle forwards? What if someone reads this posting, centuries from now, and he says: Good grief, those Twenty First Centurions were very easily satisfied. Five hours to get from New York to California?

It must have been hell.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Snow

Twitter is good at telling you about news, and today, the news has been: snow. I know. Who saw that coming??? Apart from the short-term weather forecasters, I mean.

Here are some snow pictures:

That would be a photo of the Shard. Would be because it is mostly a photo of snow, and the Shard is only just make-out-able behind the snow.

Here are two more conventional snow photos, where you can see buildings but very boring ones, the ones outside my kitchen window:

On the left, the snow descends. On the right, my neighbours make a bendy triangle of footmarks. I didn’t find those photos on Twitter, for I took them myself.

Without doubt my favourite snow-photo today was this:

Says @MisanthropeGirl: Satisfying. I agree.

But if we are talking about snow and cold, nothing since then has touched 1963. According to that story, in 1963 the sea froze.

Ah, 1963. Marlborough lost its entire hockey season that term, early in 1963. The frustrated school hockey captain was a famed future hockey international. I still regret that I never got to see him play.

It gets worse. That Christmas, the “house”, Littlefield, where I was a boarder at Marlborough College Marlborough Wilts, got burnt down, just before the “spring” term began. We lived in huts, like prisoners of war. The dormitory was another hut. I had a hot water bottle. When other Littlefieldsmen first saw this hot water bottle they sneered, but they were soon wanting to hire it from me, but I wasn’t having that. I needed it in my bed. And I distinctly remember, one morning, that this hot water bottle, in my bed, in the morning, had … frozen. I swear. There were icicles in it.

So, February 2018, I spit on your cold. Your cold could not even freeze my spit.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Worse than bad form

There were so many fun things in Churchill’s underground wartime lair. Some of my favourites were not to be seen among the genuine antiquities. Rather were they mere reproductions, on sale in the gift shop. Of these, I think this one, a wartime poster, spoke to me most eloquently, from that far off time, just a handful of years before I was born:

I have always been very careful to refrain from dressing extravagantly.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Television – video games – crime

These are experts whom I want to believe, so I do:

Violent video games may actually reduce crime as aggressive players are “too busy” shooting virtual enemies to cause trouble in the real world, experts claim.

I have long believed that television caused crime waves, in each country it arrived in, by immobilising the respectable classes inside their respectable homes and handing the world’s public spaces over to non-television-owning ne’er-do-wells, every night. It is not the sex-and-violence-on-telly that causes the crime. It is the near total absence of these things. Violent people were repelled by telly, because it was so abysmally well-behaved.

I myself have spent a huge proportion of my life watching television. Had television not existed, I would have been out in public places fighting crime, by looking like I might notice it and then give evidence against the ne’er-do-wells committing it.

But now, with the rise of video games, it is the ne’er-do-wells who are busy playing video games. Video games are not well-behaved. You get to kill people, and to commit grand theft upon autos. If duty calls, it calls on you to kill yet more people.

Presumably, this evening, the public places are all deserted. I wouldn’t know. I am watching television.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog