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From The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin Books, 1967):
In Alexandria over five hundred years later, Origen, one of the Fathers of the Church, taught that the blessed would come back to life in the form of spheres and would enter rolling into heaven.
[p. 21-22]
Baldanders is a successive monster, a monster in time. The title page of the first edition of [Hans Jakob Christoph Von] Grimmelshausen's novel [The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus / Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus, 1669] takes up the joke. It bears an engraving of a creature having a satyr's head, a human torso, the unfolded wings of a bird, and the tail of a fish, and which, with a goat's legs and vulture's claws, tramples a heap of masks that stand for the succession of shapes he has taken. In his belt he carries a sword and in his hands an open book showing pictures of a crown, a sailing boat, a goblet, a tower, a child, a pair of dice, a fool's cap with bells, and a piece of ordnance.
[p. 26-27 - Baldanders]
From The hot seat : reflections on diplomacy from Stalin's death to the Bali bombings by Richard Woolcott:
[Chapter 2, p. 15]
[Chapter 2, p. 21]
Hodgson was the only person I have ever known who carried in his wallet a cutting of his own obituary. He showed it to me once with the wry comment, "Perhaps I wasn't such a bad bastard after all."
[Chapter 3, p. 26]
[Chapter 4, p. 33]
Ambassador Waller and I discussed the arguments for and against the issue of an Australian passport to Burchett. Some of Burchett's critics in Australia were even calling for him to be tried for treason. I argued that, whatever his political attitude and notwithstanding what he had written as a war correspondent in Korea, he was Australian-born and entitled to hold the passport of the country of his birth. It was a citizenship issue, not a political issue. Given the anti-communist attitude of the Menzies Government, our strong support for American policies in Korea and Vietnam, and the fact that there was nothing to be gained from supporting Burchett's case, I was impressed when Keith Waller, as a matter of principle, agreed to recommend the issue of an Australian passport to Burchett. Predictably this application was rejected in Canberra. This did not surprise us but we believed we had done the correct thing.
[Chapter 5, p. 45]
Some time later Khrushchev asked the attorney general what had happened to this person. The attorney general replied: "Nikita Sergeyevich, he was dealt with according to the law. He was sentenced to twelve years deprivation of liberty and he is now in Siberia."
Khrushchev looked concerned. "Comrade Attorney," he asked, "is this consistent with our less repressive, more open style of government since Stalin died?"
"It is consistent with Soviet law," the attorney general replied. "The man was sentenced to two years for disturbing the peace and ten years for revealing a state secret."
[Chapter 5, p. 50]
But who wrote that the sacrifice of myth to reality is one of the misfortunes of travel? Despite my excitement I had something of this feeling on arriving in Timbuktu [in Mali]. So little was left of its illustrious past, so little to remind you that this was once a great cultural, trading and religious centre in the fifteenth century. Now it seemed a forgotten city, passive, decaying, burnt out by the relentless sun; a place on the edge of nowhere, where time stood still and the future vanished; the ultimate retreat.
The predominant colour was grey. There was a greyish quality about the sand. The houses were grey. Even the precious water carried by the Kabara canal from the Niger River was grey. There was grey dust in the air and grey dust on the leaves of the few stunted trees.
Timbuktu was quiet. There were no cars and even the footfalls of camels, donkeys and humans were softened by the sand. There were no real roads, just sand passages between the rows of secretive grey houses.
I climbed to the top of the main tower of the mosque of Djinguereber. Timbuktu was spread out before me in the morning sunlight, a maze of alleys and narrow streets of squat clay dwellings stretching away into the haze and the sand dunes. Beyond, there was nothing; nothing but sand and the salt mines of Taoudenit, twelve days into the desert by camel. Below me I noticed that the houses were constructed of handmade, oblong mudbricks, baked in the sun. Many homes had carved wooden doors with ornate locks of considerable beauty. The houses were usually square with flat roofs on which people slept during the hot summer nights.
At midday the houses seemed almost flattened into the sand by the blazing sun in a remarkable unity of sand, land, houses and haze, the dwellings blending into their surroundings so that architecture seemed to have lost its function. At night, however, under the moon and in the crisp air, Timbuktu was transformed into a city of exotic silver beauty and mystery.
The faces of the people reflected Timbuktu's colourful history; for centuries it was the melting pot, the place where the desert took over from tropical Africa, where peoples from the north and the south met and traded and fought and intermarried. You seem many pale, almost white, faces and many thin lips, aquiline noses and flashing teeth. Arabs, Moroccans, Touregs (natives of Mali), black Africans and Europeans have mingled their blood here.
Perhaps the most colourful sight in Timbuktu was the market, where the city became animated. Camels and donkeys, pottery and foodstuffs and local jewelery were traded. And grass! Not the marijuana variety but the grass that grew on the banks of the Niger River ten kilometres away and was a precious commodity in Timbuktu. It was carried to the town in boats made of small pieces of wood stitched together with bark strings, because the trees were too stunted to provide pieces of timber large enough to make boats in any other way.
I shall never forget Timbuktu, which remains a vivid and haunting memory. My only bad recollection is that, after I'd written and sent some forty postcards from this unique location, not one was received by its addressee.
[Chapter 8, p. 91-93]
[Chapter 8, p. 95]
Getting the right result was complicated in two ways. First, he had a curious method of scoring to his own advantage. Second, he would often run across me as I was playing a stroke. Naturally, I did everything, including not playing the shot and losing points to avoid hitting him. On two occasions, however, I did hit him when he suddenly leapt in front of me, too late for me to abort the stroke; once in New York and once in London. On the second occasion - a few hours before he was to appear on BBC television - I accidentally inflicted a nasty cut on the bridge of his nose. This was widely reported in the Australian media and the situation was compounded by the the humourist Alan Fitzgerald sending me a telegram that read: "Congratulations on second attack on PM. I hope the third attack is completely successful. Suggest you dump body in Channel."
Unfortunately, McMahon was an early riser and went through all the cables and papers in the delegation's office, and he read this telegram from Fitzgerald addressed to me. He was very angry and, although I said the telegram was simply a poor joke, he hardly spoke to me for two days.
[Chapter 9, p. 107-108]
From Walking on water: a life in the law by Chester Porter (Random House Australia, 2003):
[p. 32]
[p. 50-51]
In order to succeed for a plaintiff induced to lose money by fraud or misrepresentation, it is necessary to prove that he or she was in fact misled, and that the fraud or misrepresentation actually induced the contract. The problem was that if the plaintiff had been deceived, he or she was going to be a hopeless witness. If the plaintiff turned out to be shrewd and capable, how could one believe that he or she was deceived by the vendor? I have seen a lot of business victims fail in court because they were bad witnesses.
Many a working person tries to be the independent owner of a small business but fails, not merely because of inexperience, but because of deception by one of the many clever tricksters who seeks his or her money. The loss of entire savings can be a small tragedy for the plaintiff. I handled a lot of such cases and I lost quite a few. On the other hand, I often obtained settlements that eased the pain such losses caused.
[p. 56]
[p. 56]
There is so much hypocrisy about sentencing criminals. How many drivers have not committed the offence of driving above the limit for alcohol and causing deaths, only because they were lucky. How many people have "borrowed" money from various funds contrary to the criminal law, but have got it back in time, or have otherwise never been discovered? How many people have lost their tempers, but through good luck no serious injury resulted?
Instead of remembering Christ's admonition "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone", the voters of today are apparently prepared to cheer on the politicians who advocate tougher sentences, even mandatory sentences, to be imposed regardless of the circumstances. Some politicians even begrudge the prisoners having television in their cells, and describe barbaric prisons as "hotels".
Thus we build more and more brutal prisons which are highly successful as universities of crime, which ruin the lives of persons who are not dedicated criminals and which fail dismally as places of rehabilitation, and fail even more as the means of deterring or preventing crime.
Sex offenders are not infrequently the victims of extreme sentences, at times more than they would receive for murder. Such sentences obviously encourage such offenders to kill their victims to avoid detection.
I have often said that I stood between people and what they deserved. No one wants to receive their just deserts, but, of society's scoundrels, only those who happen to contravene the criminal law and get caught, get their just deserts at the hands of the law. In my opinion, they often receive punishments far beyond what they deserve. And the rest advocate more severe penalties.
What hypocrites we are, led by the nose by cynical politicians!
[p. 96-97]
[p. 119]
My first such case was Sirinjui - whose companion decided to throw four spears at the victim. Apparently for comity my client then threw a further four spears on the spur of the moment and not pursuant to any common purpose or pre-arrangement. This was the first of several appearances before the great Sir Owen Dixon who was very amused by my submissions that the appellant could not be charged with murder since his spears may well have been thrown at a corpse nor could he be charged with mutilating a corpse since the victim may have still been alive. Sir Owen cited a famous Harvard puzzle:
A man has two deadly enemies when he is about to make a trip across a desert. One poisoned his water in his water-bag, the other slashed the bag so that it leaked. The man died of thirst. Who, if anyone, was guilty of murder?
Ultimately Sirinjui was acquitted.
[p. 119-120]
[p. 236]
Zero crime tolerance is bad policy. Tormenting the people for minor offences only makes them hostile to the police, who should be regarded as friends. Setting quotas for traffic police so that traffic patrols become revenue collections is very bad for public relations and honest policing.
[p. 261]
Meanwhile [in commercial cases], trolley after trolley of dubiously relevant documents are wheeled into court, lengthy affidavits are argued ad infinitum as to admissibility of evidence, applications for discovery and production of yet more documents proceed drearily from day to day, interspersed with lengthy written submissions by counsel. Eventually the case resolves itself into numerous issues and proceeds from week to week in cross-examination, legal objections, and so on. That costs per party can run into the millions is not surprising.
Even in that sort of litigation the case is as often decided as not decided on who is believed as to the conversations between the parties. It is, in fact, surprising how enormously important a few words can be between senior company officials. I can remember one recent case where tens of millions of dollars depended on a telephone conversation.
How does one decide the true facts in such a case? The persons speaking may or may not have made notes soon after. Contemporary notes are valuable, but often record the conversation as desired by the speaker, rather than as it actually occurred. This does not mean the notes are dishonest, but merely that people often have very faulty immediate recollections of what was said and tend to believe what they want to believe.
Of course there are the not-so-honest witnesses who doctor their notes or diaries. In once case I was faced with a business diary recording conversations very different from the account in my instructions. Normally such a diary would win the case for the opposition, but I was able to point to significant indications of concoction, and we won. It is actually quite difficult to concoct a business document in a foolproof fashion. I remember one client of mine, whose takings book for a shop had been concocted using the wrong year's calendar!
[p. 264-265]
Yet many an independent witness is very unreliable. Most accidents happen in a flash and it is easy to get a false impression. Furthermore, it is human nature to garnish the story when one is the crucial witness who is going to decide the case.
Most judges grab for the independent witness as a means of solving their problem. But that witness may easily be a bent reed.
Some witnesses are just difficult. Doctors earn big money from accidents, but often resent being called to give evidence for injured plaintiffs. I learned long ago not to ask such a witness whether the plaintiff had suffered much pain. The answer would be that appropriate drugs had dealt with that problem. No, the proper course was to leave it to the defendant's counsel to suggest that the analgesics had substantially eliminated the pain. The doctor would vigorously reject the proposition and say that the plaintiff had suffered a great deal of pain. The witness had to contradict someone. So let it be counsel for the other side.
Quite a few witnesses try to be smart. What lawyer has not been bored witless at some social event by the layman who gave evidence in a case (only one, thank goodness) and confounded the cross-examining counsel. As an advocate, I quite frequently let such witnesses take charge of the proceedings and dominate me. In no time they would say something extraordinarily stupid and they were able to destroy their own evidence.
To return to demeanour, how does demeanour help in deciding between an ugly man and a pretty girl? I lost faith in the accuracy of legal fact-finders some years ago and one case which helped to clear my thoughts was between my client, a very ugly man, and a pretty socialite woman for whom he had done some contract work in her luxury home. The contract was verbal. The case depended on who was believed as to the terms of a conversation. It was obvious that my client had no chance, none whatsoever, not because he was a liar or a fool, but because he was ugly and spoke with a thick accent and his opponent was a pretty socialite woman.
Some time later I appeared again before another judge in a motor accident case. He was noted for always finding for the plaintiff, but this time he found for my client, the defendant, a pretty girl from a leading socialite family. It was not due to any skill on my part.
[p. 270-271]
A necessary reform is the better investigation of these offences. Police and doctors should not simply presume guilt. They should make a detailed inquiry as to where the truth lies. In my experience as a barrister this did not occur. In particular, police arrested people without even asking them to reply to the charges against them. If they had carefully investigated the statements of the accused some cases would never have proceeded. In others the court would have a much better background of surrounding facts in which to decide between the accuser and the accused and investigated the case more thoroughly.
Under existing law the judge directing the jury in such a case should direct the jury that where the Crown case depends on one witness, the evidence of that witness should be scrutinised with care. That is only common sense but does not draw the jury's attention to the fact that where the Crown case depends on one witness only, who is not corroborated with other evidence, then there is a real danger of miscarriage of justice unless very special care and scrutiny is exercised by the jury.
The fact is that numerous sexual-assault cases, and for that matter other one-on-one criminal cases, involve a special danger of jury error. If we are honest with ourselves we have to admit that many jury errors occur in all types of criminal cases. In holding that the death penalty involved an "undue risk of executing innocent people" (Sydney Morning Herald, 3 July 2002) Judge Rakoff in the US District Court for New York said, "What DNA testing has proved, beyond cavil, is the remarkable degree of fallibility in the basic fact-finding processes on which we rely in criminal cases." United States death-row convictions investigations have already revealed over 100 wrongful convictions.
We flatter ourselves if we think our courts do that much better in this regard than those in the United States.
How can we improve this? The best reform is of police practice. At present the police find a suspect and then target him or her. If they could be persuaded to search for the truth rather than evidence against the target, many injustices would be avoided. Not only would fewer innocent people be convicted, but if the defences of suspects were impartially investigated before trial and preferably before arrest, false defences would be more likely to fail.
Many times juries retire to consider their verdicts when the decision could go either way. How often are they wrong? For years this has worried me. I have been quite unable to assume, as some judges do, that accused persons are almost always guilty. I know that there must be many innocent people who are convicted. How many, it is hard to say. In one-to-one accusations of sexual assault there must be many errors, since we do not have anything like a reliable system of fact-finding.
The fact-finding side of the law needs much more research and study. In the past the great minds of the law have concerned themselves with esoteric points of law. The law journals have rarely dealt with fact-finding, and the appeal courts usually avoid it by saying that the trial judge had the "inestimable advantage" of seeing and hearing the witnesses. But I believe things are changing.
It is obviously desirable that there should be public confidence in the courts. However, maintaining public confidence should not result in pretending that problems do not exist.
The problems of fact-finding also exist in the civil courts. Often the presence of documents guides the decision but there are many cases of one-on-one witnesses with little else to assist the court. In these cases, proof only has to be on the balance of probabilities so that a defendant can incur heavy damages on slight evidence.
The problem about being a busy practitioner is that one has little time for thought about the wider problems of the law. I found that as a barrister my thoughts were preoccupied by the problems of my clients. Now that I have retired I appreciate more and more that the real problems are not the law itself, but the ways in which the law is enforced.
Quite frequently I read about how misconduct, even criminal conduct, is not exposed because those who know the truth fear being sued for libel. This particularly occurs in company affairs. Sometimes in practice I had to advise auditors who feared to do their duty by making appropriate criticisms lest they be sued. It was not a foolish fear. Being sued for defamation can ruin an ordinary person and can result in the loss of his or her home to pay damages and costs, particularly the latter. The threat by a wealthy man to sue an ordinary person is no empty one. It is a brave person who defies that threat.
Defamation has become technical. It was always expensive; now it is much more so. The purse of an ordinary person will be emptied long before the case comes on for hearing. This will be the result of endless interlocutory (or preliminary) proceedings which seem to grow up like Hydra heads in defamation proceedings. Pleadings - that is, the filed statement of the case - will be challenged and argued over, further particulars will be sought and argued over, discovery of documents is quite likely, and so one.
When the case comes on at last, there are arguments and findings about what the allegedly defamatory words really mean, and then at last (in a different hearing) there will be an argument about defences.
The auditors doing their job will have a defence of qualified privilege because they were only doing their duty. However an auditor cannot act maliciously. Malice will destroy the privilege. But an angry exchange of words during the audit might be evidence of malice. Of course, truth will be a defence, but often what is well known and certainly true is hard to prove in a court of law.
If an auditor finds that a rich director has been dishonest, he has a duty to expose the director, but the auditor may well be at risk.
In local government, a mayor or councillor who has been involved in shady deals may well intimidate the other councillors by threats to sue for defamation. Such stories are not infrequent in the local papers.
I am sure that the Watergate exposure of President Nixon would not have occurred in Australia because of our defamation laws. Reform is constantly advocated but difficult to achieve. The need to protect reputations is to be weighed against the need to expose evil. One partial answer is along the lines of American law which permits bona fide criticism and "exposure" of public figures even if it is erroneous. In America, unlike Australia, public figures cannot easily recover big windfalls of damages if they are lucky enough to be defamed although recent Australian decisions have improved this situation.
The defamation problem is closely related to the general problem of expense in litigation. This is particularly apparent in commercial litigation. The smaller individual or company has no way of litigating against wealthy and ruthless companies and cartels.
The unfortunate fact is that court procedures are now very detailed, complicated and expensive, which obviously favours the wealthy. When I started at the bar procedures were much simpler. Interlocutory proceedings were short, if they occurred at all. Cases were also much shorter. Since everything had to be typed, if it was to be copied, only relevant documents were in the brief. One did not even see binders. The hearings were for days rather than weeks or months. There were no computers to dig up reports of cases which were probably best forgotten. Written submissions were almost unknown. [...]
[p. 294-297]
One great reform I have seen in my time in the law has been the abolition of death duty, the State tax on deceased estates and estate duty, the federal tax in such cases. The State death-duties authorities in New South Wales, in my experience, wielded their powers ruthlessly and unhumanely. For example, nothing could be spent, even on supporting the widow and children of the deceased person until death duty had been assessed and paid. In a complicated estate this might take years. In a simple case it took months. Those who remember will never agree to such a tax again.
Estate duty was a charge on the estate and its imposition was administered with more common sense. However, both forms of duty were avoided by the wealthy, with the aid of clever lawyers. Middle- and lower-income families often suffered real hardship.
We are still left with the task of imposing fair taxation. The Income Tax Act is far from fair. The wealthy still avoid its provisions by highly skilled legal advice. The middle- and lower-income earners pay for the wealthy. This injustice has not been solved, partly because the problem is difficult, but mainly because the wealthy wield great political power.
So a waiter who works two jobs and fails to declare one is likely to be caught and punished. The tycoon who avoids tax on millions of dollars has little to fear. The waiter evades tax because what he does is illegal. The tycoon avoids tax because, thanks to the well-paid efforts of his lawyers, he is acting in some elaborate scheme that is within the law. Thus the great gap between rich and poor is aggravated even more. This gap is, in my opinion, one of the greatest problems of our age, and we ignore it at our peril.
However, we should appreciate that economic reforms did at least, at first, produce great wealth, spread throughout Australian society. If things seem to be in need of urgent reform now, it may be that the law will have to interfere, perhaps in new types of laws which we have not seen before.
When I started in the law I was taught to admire the law rather uncritically. Then I started to see its faults only too clearly, and then I appreciated the problems.
I think that great progress has been made over the last half-century but we cannot be complacent. There are many more problems for the law to try to solve.
[p. 302-303]
From Rescuing the Spectacled Bear by Stephen Fry (Random House, 2002):
[Chapter 1, p. 18-19]
[Chapter 1, p. 23]
[Chapter 1, p. 27-28]
[Chapter 1, p. 33-34]
[Chapter 2, p. 42-43]
[Chapter 2, p. 44]
[Chapter 3, p. 49]
[Chapter 3, p. 50-51]
[Chapter 4, p. 63]
[Chapter 4, p. 64]
[Chapter 4, p. 67-68]
[Chapter 13, p. 146-147]
[Chapter 13, p. 147]
Never mind: like a groom flicking confetti from his hair on the honeymoon night, I brushed a dozen assorted horrors of the insect world from my sweaty locks and repeated the mozzie netting business.
I think the noise had only dimly been on my mind before this point. I had been concentrating too much on avoiding cockroaches underfoot and folding clothes away high and out of tarantula reach (yes there really are tarantulas here) for the sound to make much of an impression. Now that I was alone and nudely panting in my mosquito tent crushed by the deep black of the night, the astonishing sound of the night began to make themselves known to me.
In the manner of Cole Porter's "Now You Has Jazz": the sounds of the jungle night are composed this: first you take a snare drum a thousand feet in diameter and upon it you place a million steel wing-nuts. You put the whole contrivance on a giant pulsing vibrator of some kind. This is your basic background, a kind of rhythmic snare buzzing, but on a titanic scale. Cicadas I suppose, but who can tell? I can't honestly believe the scraping of a few little insect legs could possibly cause so enormous and all-encompassing a sound. It is all around you and never lets up for one second. At six o'clock, the man from the seventies dinner-party who always set the table on a roar with his trimphone impression will butt in from time to time with his entertaining chirrup. Fourteen or fifteen people closer to you, sometimes alarmingly close, idly run the back of their thumbnails along a comb for no reason. A whoop appears out of nowhere and, once started, is repeated with the same insistent monotony as the "Barmy Army!" chant of the England cricket groupies. Some one or thing, possibly related to the trimphone impersonator, suddenly starts doing a water droplet impression: a kind of echoey 'prip'. If there isn't already a species of bird or possibly frog called The Bren Gun, then I've discovered one, for that starts up too, rat-tat-tatting at first to the left and then to the right of you. It's all getting a little worrying.
But, as the sweat spirals around your neck and you feel your pupils dilate enough to see, or imagine that they see, quite horrid shapes and sights at the window, the brain slowly accustoms itself to this great screen of sound: for it is rhythmic and sleep seems a possibility. That's when a blood-curdling scream as of a young girl having her hair pulled by an ogre suddenly explodes so close to you that you leap from your bed shouting in fear.
What the hell was that?
It must have been in the room with you. Even if it's only a money or a lorikeet it's too much, far too much to bear. You shout louder and smack your sodden pillow in a way that wouldn't frighten a dove, but what else can you do? Run from your room into the night?
Somehow you settle again. And this time a creature speaks, calmly and with great assurance.
"Parsimony."
You hear it quite clearly and now you know you have gone mad. Parsimony? Why would a jungle creature speak English? And if he did, why would he say "parsimony"? It makes no sense. No sense at all. But it was so clear and so nakedly forthright that the ghost of the word seems to stand out in the night like the aural equivalent of a retinal after-image.
You're miles from mummy and there are screaming things and buzzing things and flapping things and things that say "parsimony". And, now - dear God - and now there's something scratching at the door.
It's stopped scratching and now it's slithering around the corner.
There's only one thing to do. Why didn't you think of it before?
You get out of bet once more, stamping hard on the ground and whistling to show the whole alien horrible jungle that you don't care a bit, and you reach into your sponge bag pulling out twice the recommended dose of Zopiclone sleeping tablets.
They take about twenty minutes to kick in. Twenty minute of howling and buzzing and plucking and scratching and screeching and laughing and repeated assurances of parsimony but in the end you're in a place where you don't care what threatens or mocks or torments or bites you, nor what might slither or crawl over you and when you wake up it's a shining day full of bright parrots and green fronds and dappled light and wonderful, miraculous jungle smells that fill you with a heavenly and unabashed joy.
[Chapter 13, p. 151-154]
[Chapter 16, p. 178]
Children ran to try and keep up. [...]
I remember a series in my childhood on the BBC called, I think, Great Railway Journeys of the World in which Paul Theroux or similar would cross India or Siberia on a train. I don't recall a Peruvian railway being filmed, Perurail didn't exist then of course, but there is no question that Cusco to Aguas Calientes is just about the most wonderful journey you can take on the planet. The gorges, peaks, and (at this time of year) the tumbling, spouting, splurging and quite terrifying fast and frisky Urubamba river have a surprise at every corner. I can do no better than to quote Matthew Parris on Peruvian countryside, from his classic, Inca-Kola:
... a sense of something no English landscape can inspire. It is the feeling that what lies within vision is only just the beginning of what waits beyond.
What waited beyond for us, of course, was the town of Agaus Calientes. If Machu Picchu is the crown on the top of Peru's head, it's a shame that just about the only way to reach it is by way of Peru's arsehole. For I'm afraid that's what Aguas Calientes is. It takes its name from the hot springs close by and is a shambolic collection of hideous buildings thrown up with no thought or consideration for the Eight Wonder of the World above it. INRENA won't let the Machu Picchu Sanctuary Hotel fit a water purifier with a year-long wait for permits, but it will allow any citizen of [Agaus Calientes] to despoil one of the world's most wonderful places. (Polly, our stillsman Rob Fraser's partner, aptly calls INRENA the institute for national perks.) The citizens fight the plans for a cable car which would be one of the most sensational and beautiful experiences imaginable, because they fear for the monopoly the hold on bus-rides up the mountain. The whole place should be bulldozed and a town of which Peru can be proud should be put there in its place.
[Chapter 16, p. 179-181]
From Still Spitting at Sixty by Roger Law (HarperCollins, London 2005):
My first surprise in Gibraltar was the discovery of another back-up witness, Simpson's pretty young bride of very recent vintage. So we were honeymooning and investigating at the same time. Stealth was apparently of the essence, so the approach to Morocco was made in a small boat of dubious seaworthiness which Simpson had hired at the quayside. Within twenty minutes of setting foot on Moroccan soul we were all under arrest.
Simpson remonstrated with the cops in his best British gunboat commander style, but they were unmoved. It appeared that coastguards have given them concrete intelligence of the arrival of a smuggler's vessel with a description of the three people on board that fitted us perfectly - one white man, one white woman and one Japanese sumo wrestler. After Simpson had been allowed to make a number of furious phone calls, which must have alerted the rest of North Africa to the arrival of an undercover investigative team, the police started to relent. And when the boat proved to be 'clean' it was convivial mint teas all round.
[Chapter 7, The Cosmic Couch, p. 90]
[...] The way ahead, the advertising people thought, was to make the magazine more consumer-oriented, essentially making the editorial content serve their perceptions of the needs of the market. Magnus Linklater, to his credit, thought this was a lousy idea, and said so. Within a few months he was summarily relieved of his command, and replaced by Hunter Davies who took to the journalism of how to mow your lawn, how to buy your car and how to brush your dog's teeth, like a duck to water.
[...] Years later I bumped into Davies at a magazine reunion bash where he remarked that I'd done so well in television that perhaps I should thank him for firing me from the magazine. I might have done, if he had acted so decisively. But the truth was that he simply bored me slowly out of the building.
[Chapter 8, Luck and Flaw, p. 96-99]
When some crucial deadline approached, I used to watch Fluck out of the corner of my eye with appalled fascination. He would drop some vital tool off the bench, but instead of stooping and picking it up like any sane person, he would set to work making a replacement tool from the odds and sods on the bench. If I dared to say anything, he would fudge the issue with a crafty remark like, "It's too hot to bend down." As a matter of fact, during the summer months it was too hot in all positions. We had no end of experts coming to counsel us on how to improve ventilation in the chapel, but the best advice, admittedly given by a very highly qualified architect, was that we should wear kaftans.
[Chapter 8, Luck and Flaw, p. 101-102]
[...] My counter-argument was that teaching students how to get paid for expressing their real selves might in the long run, even at the risk of self-indulgence, prove to be more advantageous to them than crabbed exercises in producing useful diagrams of how to load your camera, and suchlike - and in the short run it was certainly a lot less boring. He [the head of department] was not convinced. I taught there against the prevailing ethos for a while until the moment when I had to leave came to me with extreme clarity. A young student there showed me four sheets of artwork in colour, all based on household objects. The presentation was quite stunning, and I heard myself saying, "These are absolutely beautiful. You really should go to art school."
[Chapter 8, Luck and Flaw, p. 104-105]
I have another Christmas Carol story which nobody believes but which I'm obliged to relate on account of its being true. In the quest for an American publisher for the book I flew to New York, where indifference reigned. I couldn't find a single published even ready to discuss the book, let alone buy it. Looking around the bookshops I happened to notice that many of the prime best-sellers were books about how to cook chicken. I then re-rang a select hit-list of publishers to say that I had a book for sale called Chicken Dishes of the World, which had lavish illustrations. This led to almost instant appointments with a range of top commissioning editors.
Oddly enough, none of them expressed any great surprise on finding out that I was selling Dickens, not chickens. In London I would probably have been promptly shown the door, but in New York there seems to be a presumption that anyone inventive enough to trick their way in might, conceivably, also have something worthwhile to offer.
[Chapter 8, Luck and Flaw, p. 113-114]
It would take one hour of studio time, television most sacred commodity, to produce one screenable minute of Spitting Image. Fluck's suggestion of retitling the show The Enough Money for a Mental Hospital Show was not regarded as very funny.
[...] the team of youngsters [...] we had slaving in the workshop [...] called the show Splitting Headache.
[Chapter 9, Here's One I Made Earlier, p. 126, 130]
From then on we had no real problems with the Royals, who became one of the show's more enduring mini sit-coms. Our treatment of them was robust, but I like to think that we never lowered the tone of the monarchy quite as far as Rupert Murdoch's Sun. Ultimately of course nobody lowered the tone quite as efficiently as the Royals themselves.
[Chapter 10, Hit and Miss, p. 139]
I'm still not sure why we enjoyed such latitude in these areas, but I think the ephemeral nature of television had a lot to do with it. That, and the fact that the English only seem to take two things seriously, gardening and literature. As for the box - "it's only television".
[Chapter 10, Hit and Miss, p. 140-141]
"To our great misfortune the situation with the project Rubber Souls [a play on the title of Gogol's book Dead Souls] turned out to be a detective story. The person who was in charge for organizing the probationer's trip to London committed sabotage by some unknown reasons (which are going to be clarified by the specialists). Judging by the fact that there was no objective reasons for this and we didn't doubt qualification and decentness of the employee until recent, so we only may propose an intellectual spying ... Hoping that soon we shall be able to receive explanation of the accident we expect your understanding ..."
[...] It all culminated in a farewell supper [...] it was all unbelievably amicable, until we hit on the idea of a jokes competition.
The Russian's head comic write kicked off with a long, almost impenetrable story [...]
Polite laughter. But our British champion comic writer obviously thought something a shade more punchy would elicit a better response. "What," he asked, "is the difference between your mother and a terrorist?" No one knew, so he naturally supplied the answer: "You can negotiate with a terrorist."
There was shocked slavic silence, until the largest and most aggressive Russian menacingly demanded to know, "What do you mean - my mother?"
At this point our jokesmith tried to extricate himself by explaining that no slur was intended on any specific Russian mother - the gag only applied to the idea of motherhood in the most general sense, anybody's mother, even his own personal mother who, of course, he held in the very highest esteem.
"Ah," said the Russian, suddenly drained of belligerence, "you mean your mother. Ho, ho, ho."
With this interpretation it became possible for us all to raise our glasses to "the British joke".
[Chapter 11, Spitting Imperialism, p. 154-156]
The idea had originated with Claudio Abbado, the Italian maestro [...] Abbado, however, seemed ready to overlook the limits of my musical education, as long as I did not take too many liberties with the story line of a boy in a forest, on intimate terms with a duck and bird, who has a serious altercation with a wolf.
Some liberties were taken, not all of them initiated by Spitting Image. It was the responsible classical music lover, Christopher Swann, who had the brilliant idea of a duck with a serious drinking problem. This allowed us to feature a marvellous Esther Williams-type underwater sequence of the duck surging down to locate the bottle of vodka he had dropped in the pond. Even so, the business of creating a credible drunken duck created severe technical problems. [...]
[Chapter 12, Trash for Cash, p. 168-170]
He illustrated the point with a cautionary tale. Last year, he had been on assignment in Brazil and had written home in his dispatch, almost as an aside, "I thought Sydney had the greatest harbour in the world until I saw Rio ..." Mega huge mistake. "Mate, the protest mail came in by the sackload. If I'd said I was going to barbecue a live koala on the steps of the Opera House I would not have got one tenth of the outcry." Alex suggested that if I couldn't think of anything sufficiently laudatory to say about the city's appearance I should take refuge in Gore Vidal's observation to the effect that "Sydney is the city that San Francisco thinks it is."
[Chapter 14, The Blue Beyond, p. 192-193]
The few males they do manage to snare are brought into Charleville's wildlife centre to breed and are later released back into the wild wearing a radio collar. There are no trees in Astrebla so the rangers set up their radio mast on top of a shed. A wedge-tailed eagle immediately build a nest in it and at night the dingoes circled the shed hoping one of the chicks would fall out of the nest. Life in Astrebla is tough for all species. [Chapter 19, Home and Away, p. 271-272]
From Funny Business - An Outsider's Year in Japan by Gary Katzenstein (Grafton Books, New York, 1990):
Just to check, I asked a young man in English, "Is this Hiro Station?"
"No," he began, "it's --" He stopped. "Oh," he said, "I see. You mean Hiroo. Yes, yes, it is!"
I
could
see
that
with
the
slightest
deviation
in
pronunciation
I
would
be
in
trouble.
An
evening
in
Los
Angeles's
Little
Tokyo
came
back
to
me.
I
wanted
to
try
out
the
Japanese
I
was
intensely
studying
in
anticipation
of
my
trip.
I
tried
ordering
pickles
in
a
restaurant
but
managed
to
ask
for
male
genitals,
much
to
the
amused
astonishment
of
the
Japanese
diners.
[possibly
mixing
[Chapter 3, p. 33-34]
It was exactly as it had been described to us in our orientation: a highly stylized ritual with all the aestetic Japanese elements present. Concentration. Texture. Acerbity. Scarcity. Contrast.
Each movement was done silently, with perfect attention. The ceramic bowls were turned in the celebrants' hands before drinking so they might feel the highly irregular texture of the asymmetrically coloured pieces. Even the tea had its special texture as it frothed up after being stirred as it brewed. Sweets were served, just a few, extremely sweet, the excessive sweetness contrasting with the bland (sometimes bitter) tea.
Wandering downhill from the temple, I came upon a shed. Inside were two men and two women dressed in long, dark-blue skirts and plain white blouses, the traditional dress of the warrior. One man and one woman stood motionless on the wooden floor, both facing in the same direction. I couldn't imagine what was happening. Then I heard a whoosh and a thud. Looking toward the sound of the impact, I saw targets. The two people were perfectly immobile, statues with bows in their hands. Slowly they put down their bows and left the platform. The other pair took their place with great ceremony. They selected arrows with painstaking care, then stood silent. After some moments, they raised their bows effortlessly. The man drew back the bowstring and held it poised for some time. The discipline and intensity were amazing.
The arrow flew. It shot forward and into the target's precise centre. After perhaps a minute, his companion replicated his motions and similarly pierced the target's heart. Had there been no bows, no arrows, I might have mistaken it for a religious ceremony.
[Chapter 3, p. 34-35]
The times they initiated a conversation their sentences seemed curiously punctuated. Although I waited to hear them out, they never seemed to finish a thought. The longer they spoke, the more hesitant they seemed to get. Sentences were left dangling; it was maddening.
Every other sentence seemed to end with a question: "Ne?" "Right?" It eventually dawned on me that the appropriate response was, "Soo desu ne." "Yes, it's true."
I also began to add the hesitant ne to my assertions, and to reply with soo desu ne to observations made to me. Thus I slowly learned aizuchi, the little words and phrases that aided the flow of conversation in Japanese.
The speaker expects a listener to occasionally interject an aizuchi, such as "I see ... I hear you ... Is that so? ... Right". This is to show involvement. Hearing an aizuchi word interrupting him, the speaker knows the other person is attentive and listening. Not being interrupted makes the speaker think the listener isn't following or is upset.
One morning, Takagai-san answered the phone and turned to me, saying, "This telephone call is for you, but ..."
"'But' what?" I said.
"'But' ... it is just a word. 'But'. It's what you say at the end of a sentence so as not to sound too ... too ..." He faltered. "To give balance," he said, finally, and I understood.
It was like "probably", another word I often heard at the end of a declaration. Questions put to me were similarly fuzzed. People would pose a question: "Do you want a cup of tea?" Then add, "... or something?" Or else they would say, "Would you like a cookie ... more or less?"
Naru, the verb "to become", was similarly common - that is, things rarely happened due to cause and effect. Instead, they would just "become". Nohara-san would never say, "I didn't get my work done so I had to stay late and work overtime." He would say, "Overtime became necessary". It was no one's fault; it just happened: It became necessary.
These were all small ambiguous expressions that allowed others to participate. They were invitations to partake that made communication a group endeavour. Their ambiguity also robbed sentences of any possible aggressive tenor, rendering them curiously oblique, and their passive construction made it seem as if no one person was ever solely responsible.
I understood perfectly as I discussed with several co-workers some simple office arrangements. Bits and pieces of a sentence would be supplied by three or four people. It was as if everyone was finishing the sentence for the other person, only to have someone else pick up the sentence and continue. The group was speaking. The group was harmonious; the speakers, content.
[Chapter 4, p. 45-47]
I was often told to meet someone near a certain statue of a dog, or under a certain restaurant's neon sign. Streets would be referred to by their dominant edifice. I would be told to look for a friend "on the McDonald's side" of the street. The relationship between places was what mattered, even in the instance of maps."
Japanese maps, in fact, did not even always show distances drawn to scale. Nor was north automatically to be presumed the primary point of orientation. Sometimes north was on the bottom, sometimes on top, or not given at all. The trick was to think of the map's contents as a group. The relationships within the group were accurate, but the group's relation to the outside world was ambiguous. Such information was not viewed as critical.
It was this other psychology or mindset that I contemplated when an invitation came for me to attend a meeting of Sony's English Club. I was delighted to accept as I hoped to meet a lot more English-speaking employees all at once and perhaps even find one of them who would be willing to have me work for him, as I seemed to be struck doing next to nothing where I was.
The club turned out to have about twenty members who met once a week after work. It was their aim to improve their reading and writing skills. [...]
The meeting opened with several of the men reading aloud from their business memos. I listened attentively as the first businessman, then the second, then the third read their memoranda. They read in incomprehensible syllables that I took to be some kind of technical or scientific Japanese because I couldn't understand a word. Slowly it became evident that these memos had been written by Japanese employees of Sony posted in the [United] States. The memos had been sent back to headquarters in Tokyo, where we sat, and were being read - in English - as models to be imitated by club members.
To say that most were grammatically incorrect would have been the grossest understatement. They were, in fact, unfathomable, incomprehensible - in a word: gibberish. Nor could one have gotten past the bizarre accent in which they were being read. The deadpan renditions of these memos, done with utmost seriousness, were just a travesty. You couldn't understand what in the world these men were saying. Yet the club members seemed to have no difficulty in following the baffling sentences.
[...] After the fourth reader finished his interpretation, my comments were solicited. I broke out in a cold sweat. A swirl of realisations alighted in my poor brain. It was not mispronunciation I was listening to, or specific bastardised words. These people were speaking some other language. But how and what?
All Japanese students, I knew, studied English for six years. However, they did not study it in order to speak it; their only goal was to pass the national college examinations. Since native speakers were not allowed to teach in Japanese public schools, all were taught English by other Japanese. A handful of instructors may have lived or studied abroad, and perhaps had better pronunciation and more natural usage skills, but most spoke with heavy accents and in stilted English derived from outmoded textbooks. The students memorised long lists of vocabulary, replete with archaic expressions, and studied elaborate rules of syntax divorced from all context. Hour after hour they imitated their teacher's pronunciation, and the end result was this - some incredible closed linguistic system.
All, I realised sitting there, had throughly mastered this non-English and could understand each other. What observations might I make, perhaps? the senior person wanted to know.
My stomach tumbling - cornered - I told them the truth: what they had been reading aloud bore almost no relationship to English as spoken and written by native English speakers.
Eyes blinked but remained steady, faces remained impassive. It took a few moments for my comment to be addressed. Perhaps they had mistaken my simple Japanese, or they could not believe what I said. But my words did at last penetrate enough to provoke a cold indignation. My opinion was brushed aside. It was implied that I didn't know what I was talking about. We moved on to pronunciation practice.
I was treated to some odd utterances, only faintly related to my native tongue. Prevailed upon to correct their speech, I did so, only to be told my pronunciation was mistaken, my corrections, errors. They were speaking correctly; they had to be, because they had no trouble understanding one another. I would not, I had the distinct impression, be invited back to the English Club.
[Chapter 4, p. 56-60]
The bureau set up to promote this concept was called the Office of Not Working on Saturday. According to the papers, the bureau was not having much success despite a valiant effort. The staff was working day and night, six days a week.
[Chapter 5, p. 76-77]
"Too long! Too long!" he called out.
I hung up and inquired what was the matter.
"Your calls are too long, too long. The limit is ten minutes. That is the rule."
My head swivelled. There were two other pay phones, neither one in use as there was no one around. But I did not even bother to protest. Rules were rules.
[Chapter 6, p. 81]
"Oh, no," she said. "No doubt they were afraid. In Japan, people who travel alone are thought to be terribly odd."
"How so?"
"Persons who rent single accommodations in mountain areas like Chuzenji often do so because they are intending to commit suicide. Normal people, Gary-san, always travel in groups."
[Chapter 6, p. 86-87]
From More About the Japanese by Jack Seward (3rd Edn, Lotus Press, Japan):
Seldom will either sumo-tori lunge at the other until he has crouched down, glared, then carelessly turned away two or three times (contributing greatly to the tension building in the audience), but the referee limits these false starts to four minutes, after which he turns his ceremonial fan in the opposite direction, thereby informing the contestants that he will allow no more horsing around.
Down again the two mastodons go into a crouch and steel themselves while the referee -- looking like something out a Hieronymus Bosch painting [...] -- screams exhortations and orders at them in a high-pitched, deliberately-broken voice designed to echo down the halls of nightmarish memory for years. (Like most of the wrestlers, the referees too being training for their profession as children and are taught to deliberately break their voices by screaming into the gales that buffet the rocky coasts of Japan in winter.)
[Their Imperial Sport, p. 70-71]
This is why more than a few Japanese, upon becoming company presidents or chiefs of government bureaus, will change, like Jekyll to Hyde, from bowing, affable section chiefs or what have you to arrogant, egotistical tyrants, given over to capricious individualism. Some, however, may cloak these tendencies with a mantle of humanitarianism that is, nonetheless, founded on an overweening assumption of charismatic superiority that is nearly as repellent. These fancy themselves beneficent dictators who could solve the problems of the entire world, if only the fools would listen. With almost no one to restrain them, they sometimes come up with really preposterous ideas that contrast oddly with the sound business judgement which helped them reach their pinnacles. I am reminded of the president of one Japanese petrochemical company who not only instructed his three thousand employees exactly how to vote in all political elections but also gave them the frequent benefit of his advice regarding the smallest details of their private lives. One day when he chanced to have several hundred of them at his mercy, he found himself in a generous mood and began to toss out pearls of medical wisdom about how best to cure common ailments. When he got around to headaches, he scoffed at aspirin and the like and recommended instead that his employees place their faith in a remedy he had used for many years. Standing up straight, he closed his eyes and let his arms dangle limply at his side. Then he began to twist his trunk slowly at first from side to side, all the while chanting the Buddhist prayer "Namu Amida Butsu." As his motion increased, his arms rose higher and higher until at last they were swinging back and forth in a semi-circle at the level of his shoulders. Pausing a few seconds in his strident prayer-chanting, he explained that this was actually a form of self-hypnotism that would cure any headache in short order.
After several minutes of increasingly vigorous movement, however, he uttered a sharp cry and fell to the floor writhing in pain. At the hospital later, his doctor announced that he was treating the man for a strained ligament in his back, nervous tension, and a severe headache.
[Their Business Ethics and Attitudes, p. 170-171]
From Sharon and my Mother-in-Law by Suad Amiry (Granta Books, London, 2005):
The auction's theme was Palestina Vulgaris, and up for were a transistor radio in the shape of half a watermelon, with big black seeds; a red balloon in the shape of a VW car; a stuffed eagle; a Swiss Alps Silvana box of chocolates (which tasted more like soap from Nablus); a Henry the Eighth embroidered tableau; a highly decorated French-style vase; two Italian baroque angel statues; a mirror with a seashell frame; someone's mother's wedding dress; a set of plastic teacups; a heavy sealed glass box filled with blue sea water and two small floating boats; an electric fountain with pink balls that bobbed up and down when you plugged it in. But nothing could beat my electric Mecca tableau.
[Chapter 8, Palestina Vulgaris, p. 95-96]
[Chapter 9, A Dog's Life, p. 107-108]
From Dr. Karl's collection of great Australian facts & firsts by Karl Kruszelnicki (HarperCollins, Australia, 2002):
By 1500, swimming had become very unpopular in Europe. People thought that you could get a disease from the water by swimming in it.
[p. 268-269]
In the early 1850s, the Swordfish was the first trading ship to carry the flag of the Anti-transportation Society. It was sailing under the command of Captain John Clinch on a river inlet in Hobart. Captain J.H. Gennys of the British ship Fantome was passing by. He didn't recognise the new flag and demanded that this strange flag be taken down.
Captain Clinch shouted back angrily: "That's the Australian flag -- the Southern Cross -- the symbol of freedom! And it's about time we had our own flag, too!"
Captain Gennys was not impressed. "Indeed! You know as well as I do there's no Australian flag. Haul it down at once, sir, or I'll do it myself!"
[...]
Captain Clinch was angry at being forced to take the flag down and scornfully hoisted a tablecloth up onto the mast. He wanted to show the British ship that he would fly anything rather than a British flag!
[p. 279-280]
He won both the 800 metres and 1500 metres races. But there was no Australian flag to raise in his honour. At the presentation ceremony officials did what they could and hauled up an Austrian flag instead!
[p. 288]
From The quotable musician : from Bach to Tupac by Sheila E Anderson (Allworth, NY, 2003):
[The same quote was attributed to Dr Samuel Johnson in Clifford Pickover's book "Strange Brains and Genius - The Secret Life of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen" by Clifford A. Pickover, 1998, Plenum Press, NY:]
From A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder by Eric Abrahamson & David H. Freedman (Little, Brown and Co., NY, 2006):
[Chapter 2, A Mess Sampler, p. 28]
[A Tuscon Weekly article 2004-02-19 about Kathleen Manton-Jones and low-water plants]
[...] Americans lavish $8 billion a year in products and services on them and pour fifty million pounds of pesticides and manufactured fertilizers over them, making the flying of tiny yellow "hazardous to children and pets" flags a familiar sight [...]
Aside from all the maintenance they require, lawns are ecological disasters. Closely trimmed grass has short roots and doesn't hold moisture well. That means, for one thing, that grass tends to croak when not regularly watered; the watering costs for a fifty-foot-by-fifty-foot lawn can add nearly $100 per month to a Boston-area water and sewer bill, for example. It also means that heavy rain doesn't readily soak into the soil, leading to run-off and attendant problems with flooding, erosion, and the distribution of the pesticides, fertilizers, and other chemicals needed to avoid the dreaded sparse lawn or greenbrown patches. Grass offers almost nothing of use to birds and other normally welcome wildlife.
[...]
On a stroll through the surrounding neighborhoods [of Winterhaven, near Tuscon], Manton-Jones points out some of the alternatives that the community finds more palatable than natural landscaping. A few yards are mostly baked dirt. Another consists of a large bed of pebbles, and one is entirely bricked in. None of these yards has offended the community enough to inspire fines or threats; after all, they may not be pretty or alive, but they are neat and orderly. Continuing along occasionally requires detouring around filthy puddles taking up half the street, formed by run-off from sprinklers, and in some spots the asphalt is rippled and torn from being frequently submerged -- a strange problem in a desert city. We also pass a house with natural landscaping. The owner of this home had quietly paid his fines, later expressing his feelings in the form of a large metal sculpture in his front yard on top of which sits a lawn mower, extending upward like a middle finger.
[Chapter 2, A Mess Sampler, p. 35-37]
Just one little problem: callers hated it. Specifically, the absence of background noise leads to three difficulties. First of all [...] When the background noise is removed, the faint echoes can be made out again [...] Unlike background noise, which is random and messy, an echo is a type of correlated noise - its pattern follows that of the speaker's voice, but is shifted in time. Our brains are good at ignoring a stream of random noise, but neater, correlated noise is highly distracting.
Second, background noise creates a sense of "presence." It lets you know that the call is still connected, even if the person at the other end isn't speaking at the moment. "We've been trained to hear small background noises in phone conversations," Bourget explains. "Perfect silence sounds like a hang up. The background noise isn't really just noise. It's a form of information, providing feedback that someone is still there." People who hear complete silence at any point during a phone conversation tend to interrupt the conversation with "Hello?" and "Are you still there?"
Finally, we don't live in sealed containers. We live in a world where things that make noises are constantly near us, where in a sense even the space around us has a faint murmur to it. This noise feels right to us; at an unconscious level, it is reassuring. The technical term for this type of background noise, in fact, is comfort noise - engineers like Bourget call it CN - and trying to talk to someone in the absence of it is a bit disorienting and even a little creepy. Our brains rebel at the unnatural neatness.
The background noise had to come back. But engineers were loath to give up the battery life and channel capacity they had saved by eliminating its transmission. So they came up with a compromise. The background noise would still be stripped out, but it wouldn't be entirely discarded. Instead it would be "sampled" - that is, a computer in the network would analyze it and pull out key characteristics, such as how often its pitch varied and by how much. These characteristics would then be transmitted to the other end of the network, where a computer would use a mathematical technique - G.71 1.11, for example - to reconstruct a simulation of the background noise and add it back in with the voice. This tortuous-sounding trick fools listeners of cell-phone talkers everywhere just fine, even if it would never occur to them to appreciate it or even notice. It's not a perfect solution, of course. Once in a while, background noise can be so excessive that a little creepy silence might be welcome. And there's one type of background noise that trips up the technique: music on hold. When someone tries to speak over music on hold, the network assumes the music is noise, strips it out, and substitutes a simulated version, which, depending on the music, often comes out sounding something like a raspy wheeze.
[Chapter 2, A Mess Sampler, p. 50-52]
Designs such as the titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Dr.-Seussish Ray and Maria Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology blend swooping and jutting fun-house-mirror elements into imposing forms that imbue interior spaces with complex personalities and rarely fail to elicit emotional responses from observers. Case Western hoped for its own attention-grabbing design, and Gehry and his associates didn't disappoint, ultimately unveiling a scale model of a building of wildly askew components seemingly caught in midexplosion, all of it wrapped and pierced by a river of writhing metal ribbon. The school approved the design and brought in a small army of contractors to build it. The contractors duly admired, in a shocked and fretful way, the model of the God-awfully complex structure they were about to undertake, and then asked for the blueprints, to which Gehry's team replied that there weren't any. The contractors thought the group was joking, but Gehry and his associates assured the contractors they were serious. [...]
[...] Forgoing a detailed plan is disruptive - it creates convolution, making a neat and well-defined process messy. It subverts the contractors' familiar methods and procedures, forcing them to work with the Gehry team in the task of translating the look and feel of the model into a full scale structure. [...]
Freed from the constraints of a blueprint's rigid specifications and standard operating procedures, the contractors and architects were able to collaboratively rethink the design and construction techniques in any way necessary to achieve the project's goals. That led to an eruption of innovation. GQ [Contracting] ultimately developed a new technique for framing curving interior walls with unconventional materials, a breakthrough that [...] later led to a highly profitable new line of business. Hunt Construction [...] created a new approach to surveying construction sites; Columbia Wire and Iron Works [...] came up with a machine to double-bend steel beams; [...] DeSimon Structural Engineers developed two new framing methods for structural steel; A. Zahner Company [...] invented a new way to assemble metal panels. Not only was the finished building a stunning hit, completed on time and within budget, but most of the contractors were so pleased with the invention into which they had been pushed that they ended up changing the way they do business. Even in the highly conservative construction industry, not all surprises have to be nasty ones.
[Chapter 4, The Benefits of Mess, p. 87-89]
Today the New England Mobile Book Fair - or "Strymish's," as it's known locally - stands within five miles of two Barnes & Noble and two Borders stores comprising some 120,000 square feet of direct competition. The squat, featureless warehouse - originally a tennis-racket factory - [...] still outsells each of the four superstores in the area.
[Chapter 7, Mess and Organisations, p. 149]
All around us and in our daily lives, it seems as if there isn't anything that's not prohibited. It's enough to make you wonder if you have any rights at all! But actually, the prohibitions are essential, and there's a bright side to them. What's the point of all the prohibitions? ... What would our lives be like if everything were allowed?
It's a reasonable notion, up to a point. Children have to learn not to run out into the street or eat candy by the pound. But the idea that children must be conditioned to embrace a ubiquitous and often arbitrary array of restrictions imposed on every aspect of life seems a uniquely French one.
On the other hand, the French do make use of a colorful vocabulary of mess, including pele-mele, which the English language has borrowed as "pell-mell," and especially bordel, or "brothel." The latter is commonly employed with enthusiasm in the form of "Quel bordel!" and translates into English as "What a mess!" The French are not alone here. The use of words that mean brothel to also signify mess turns out to be nearly universal. The middle-Persian word balakhaana, which meant "an upper room," eventually made it into Turkic and thence to Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Lebanese, among several other Eastern European and Middle Eastern languages, in the form of balagan, which today is widely used to mean both "brothel" and "mess." (All English got from the deal was the word balcony.) Meanwhile, the Old Indo-European word bherdh, or "wooden plank" and later "a shack," became bordel in French, burdel in Polish, and bardak in Russian and Hebrew, again used to mean both "brothel" and "mess." English ended up with board, though also bordello, which sometimes stands in for mess in the United Kingdom, but not in the United States. Italians use casino, literally "a small house," to mean both "brothel" and "mess." One can't help wondering, in looking at this long-standing and widespread verbal intertwining of brothels and mess, if being messy didn't at one time carry a more interesting and provocative aura.
[Chapter 9, The Politics of Mess, p. 214-216]
The reason is simple. When a better, wider road is constructed between two points, it doesn't just service the cars that were traveling between those points all along, it also attracts new drivers who are impressed with the traffic-handling capabilities of the better road. And not only does an improved road attract travelers, it also attracts residents who want to live nearer to good roads and businesses that want to be nearer to a passing stream of potential customers. Now, one might reasonably argue that this sort of development can be a good thing from some points of view, but it doesn't alter the fact that traffic increases. The injection of this "induced traffic," as traffic engineers call the increase, more often than not wipes out whatever improvements in traffic flow the new road offered, and then some. University of California researchers who studied roads in thirty urban counties discovered that for every 10 percent increase in the number of new lane-miles, traffic increased by 9 percent. Another study estimated that expanding roadways in the Greater Cincinnati area caused congestion to jump by up to 43 percent. [...] Narrower, windy, busy roads unbothered by precisely spaced entrances and exits and by cleverly timed lights may be a bit of a mess, but they'll get people where they're going faster than wider, more organized replacements clogged with neat, highly regulated traffic jams.
[Chapter 9, The Politics of Mess, p. 223-224]
[Chapter 12, Pathological Mess, p. 272]
[...]
Instead of foisting standard techniques on these clients, Kolberg tried to determine what they were good at and then create individualized organizational styles to match their strengths. Called in by a high-powered scientific researcher whose inability to file had led to desk piles tall enough to block his view of the doorway and had left him unable to find even the most important papers, Kolberg noticed that he seemed to think of documents in highly idiosyncratic, personal terms; a tax document, for example, reminded him of a cat veterinary bill he had taken as a deduction. So Kolberg devised an "emotional filing system" consisting of three categories: "Keeping Me Out of Jail" (alimony, traffic violations, IRS and other documents critically requiring response), "Keeping People Off My Back" (bills and reports), and "Me" (awards, newspaper clips, and other items of personal interest). She suggested a system based on anatomy to sort out the disarray in a doctor's office, including a "stomach" to digest information, a "brain" to make decisions about it, and a "liver" to remove waste. [...] While such clients rarely became paragons of organization, Kolberg found her techniques could keep them just ordered enough to avoid the sorts of small disasters they had been facing.
[Chapter 12, Pathological Mess, p. 275-277]
Early in 2005, Hallowell and Ratey gave a talk [...] the two men took turns describing how the disorder's disorder, in spite of the heavy challenges it can present, can also be a real gift. "I wouldn't trade my ADD for anything," said Hallowell. "As far as I'm concerned, you all have attention surplus disorder." He went on to describe the ADHD mind as "a Ferrari with Chevrolet brakes," by which he meant that people with ADHD often seem to think more intensely and about more things than the rest of us, but with less control, "it shouldn't be called a 'deficit' of attention," he said. "It's a wandering of attention."
[Chapter 12, Pathological Mess, p. 279-280]
[Chapter 12, Pathological Mess, p. 280-281]
From The Moronic Inferno [and Other Visits to America] by Martin Amis (Penguin 1990):
Our meeting took place in the fourth week of October 1983. [...]
Bellow is sixty-eight. His hair is white and peripheral but the eyes are still the colour of expensive snuff. Generous yet combative, the mouth is low-slung, combining with the arched brows to give his face an animated roundness. In repose the face is squarer, harder. He looks like an omniscient tortoise.
[Saul Bellow in Chicago, p. 199-201]
[Saul Bellow in Chicago, p. 208]
From Tales of Hi and Bye: Greeting and Parting Rituals Around the World by Torbjörn Lunndmark (Cambridge University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-11754-8)
To see photographs of American school children doing the Nazi salute to the Star-Spangled Banner might seem horrifying to some, but that was the custom for 50 years or so. The practice late became known as the Bellamy Salute, after Francis Bellamy, who wrote (or at least claimed to have written) the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892.
[...] The Bellamy Salute, as it came to be known, was in fact not supposed to look like a Saluto Romano. It was a salute with a twist. Had the schools and other institutions performed the salute the way John Upham did it, with the hand flipped upwards, the embarrassing similarity with the Nazi salute would have been averted.
Perhaps because it felt awkward or unnatural, the heavenward palm was often forgotten and neglected, and in time, the salute had become identical to the Roman version.
By 1942, the Roman salute had become so associated with the Nazis and the Fascists and the atrocities in Europe that the practice was abandoned in the USA, and on 22 June that year, the current hand-over-heart stance was instituted by Congress. The new law, Public Law 829, was passed in December 1942.
[Gestures and Signals, p. 23]
[...] It must be understood that there is no one single dap, but countless variations. A particular dap works almost as a 'secret handshake'. It must be known completely by both greeters. It can comprise hand movements, dance steps, body bends, head rolls, sound effects, struts, lunges, dodges, knee-knocks and all manner of dynamic ingredients. The hand and finger movements are often digital acrobatics, incorporating slaps, flips, hits, grips, bumps, pulls, hooks, snatches, and flourishes of every imaginable kind.
Readers might have expected an instructional graphic or photograph on these pages, but there is none. It is pointless to try to illustrate a dap in line drawings or still pictures: the only way is to see it in real life or, perhaps even better, in slow-motion replay. Hands dash and flit like birds in the air; feet shuffle and tap; fingers touch and snap. A good dap is a wondrous display of human coordination. Those who can should look up the myriad clips available on the internet.
[Gestures and Signals, p. 74]
[Names & Addresses, p. 206]
From Right Hand, Left Hand : the Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, atoms and Cultures by Chris McManus (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002, ISBN 0-297-64597-8) [Notes from the book appear at http://www.righthandlefthand.com/]
[Chapter 2, Death and the Right Hand, p. 30-31]
From the notes on book's website: On putting on shoes, see Wile, I. S. Handedness: Right and left, Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1934 p.218 Wile, 1934 p.218. There is a strong parallel with an Islamic tradition,
"Allah's Apostle said, 'If you want to put on your shoes, put on the right shoe first; and if you want to take them off, take the left one first. Let the right shoe be the first to be put on and the last to be taken off.'" Sahih Bukhari, Volume 7, Book 72, Number 747: (http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/fundamentals/hadithsunnah/bukhari/072.sbt.html)
[Chapter 2, Death and the Right Hand, p. 33]
[A footnote gives the reference as Davidson, J. (1998) Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, London: Fontana, pp. 24, 44.
[Footnote: The story is told by V. Fritsch (Left and Right in Science and Life, Barrie and Rockliff, London 1968), who attributes it to the German psychologist Kurt Elze, who in 1924 invented the term 'right-left-blindness' (Elze, 1924; Elze, 1926).]
The well-trained Roman armies may have had similar problms, since 'spear' meant right and 'shield' meant left.
[Footnote: In Paradise Lost, IV: 785, Milton describes the army of Cherubim, 'Half wheeling to the shield, half to the spear' (A. Fowler, Milton: Paradise Lost, Longman, London 1971).]
[Chapter 4, Kreiz, drept, luft, zeso, lijevi, prawy, p. 60]
[Footnote from website: A video of the blood flowing through the heart, showing the spiral movement, and models of the action of a symmetric and an asymmetric heart can be seen at www.nature.com (Kilner et al., Asymmetric redirection of flow through the heart, Letters to Nature, Nature 404, 759-761, 13 April 2000) Video viewable under the 'supplementary info' link ]
[Chapter 5, The Heart of the Dragon, p. 87]
[Footnote from website: An excellent and relatively accessible account of the evolution of vertebrates can be found in H. Gee, Before the Backbone: Views on the Origins of Vertebrates, Chapman and Hall, London 1996.]
[Chapter 5, The Heart of the Dragon, p. 88]
[Footnote from website: The rats kept in a germ-free environment actually have lower levels of D-amino acid oxidase and, by inference, of D-amino acids (D. A. Bender, Amino Acid Metabolism, 2nd edn, John Wiley, Chichester 1985). ]
[Footnote from website: Bacteria and fungi that include d-amino-acids in their proteins typically do so using so-called non-ribosomal peptide synthetases, which are huge molecules that act as dedicated assembly lines for these unusual proteins (which may also contain other things which cannot be synthesised in the usual DNA-RNA mechanisms). A good recent review can be found in J. Gewolb, (2002), "Working outside the protein-synthesis rules", Science, 295, 2205-2207.]
[Chapter 6, The Toad, Ugly and Venemous, p. 132]
[Chapter 8, The Left Brain, the Right Brain and the Whole Brain, p. 200]
Handedness can also leave its traces in various artefacts. [...] A right-hander would [twist metal or metal wires] by using the left hand to hold one end firm while twisting the other end clockwise, using the powerful supinator muscles of the right forearm. The result, confusingly, is a lift-handed twist in the metal. [...] In a selection of torques, necklaces, bracelets, and domestic items such as bucket handles, forks and the like, dated between 1600 BC and 400 AD I found seventy-nine items with a left-handed spiral. Eight, however, have a right-handed spiral, slightly over ten per cent, the ancient left-handers thus having left a record of their existence.
Evidence of an earlier left-hander comes from Ötzi; the "man in the ice" who lvied about 3200 BC and died high in the Italian Alps. He was buried in the ice of a glacier, where he lay for over five thousand years until, on 19 September 1991, the ice melted sufficiently for his well-preserved body to be found. Amongst the artefacts he was carrying were [...] arrows in a quiver [...] the feathers at the tail of the arrow were held on by fletching, a thin cord wound around the shaft of the arrow. When right-handers fletch, they invariably wind in a left-handed spiral, as was the case with one of these arrows, but the other has a right-handed spiral, suggesting that it was made by a left-handed fletcher.
[...] Even if left-handers have been around for a long while, the majority of humans are right-handed and have been so for at least two million years [...] Several things suggest that Homo Habilis was right-handed. Like modern man, Homo Habilis had troubles with food getting stuck between the teeth, so an early invention was the toothpick, which, from the wear patterns found on teeth one and a half million years old, seem to have been mostly held in the right hand. [...]
Much better preserved are stone tools. [...] The anthropologist Nicholas Toth looked at [flint] chips from Koobi Fora, a site in Kenya dated to 1.8 million years ago, and found the chips were typical of those produced by right-handers, suggesting right-handedness was predominant.
[Chapter 9, Ehud, Son of Gera, p. 210-213]
[Chapter 9, Ehud, Son of Gera, p. 215-216]
[I've managed to find no reference to any such proverb, hunting for kotowaza containing 左手, with no luck so far - Fred]
[Chapter 11, Keggie-hander, p. 270]
The first thing to realise is that there is nothing wrong with the basic data - when they die, left-handers are indeed younger than right-handers. Paradoxically, however, that doesn't mean that left-handers have a lower life-expectancy than right-handers. The problem is a well-known one in epidemiology and is peculiar to studies known as "death cohorts", which take a group of people who died at the same time and look backwards at their lives. In contrast "birth cohort" studies, which are free of problems, take a group of people born at the same time and look forwards through their lives. Everyone in a birth cohort study has their twentieth, fortieth and sixtieth birthday on the same date, whereas in a death cohort their are large differences in the date when people have their birthdays. [...] Many things were very different seventy years ago, including society's attitudes to left-handedness. In Western societies, the proportion of leff-handers was much lower at the beginning of the twentieth century than at the end [...] On average, then, left-handers have been born later in the century than right-handers. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that left-handers who have recently died were born later in the century, and will thus appear to have died at a younger age. The problem of the death cohort is best seen if one looks not at the age of death in people who have just died, but instead at the current age of living people. Just as dead left-handers died younger than dead right-handers, so living left-handers are, on average, younger than living right-handers, the difference in age being precisely the same in each case. [...] To make the point more clearly, people who read Harry Potter books are younger than those who do not. Ask the relatives of a group of recently deceased people whether their loved one had read Harry Potter and inevitably one will find a younger age at death in the Harry Potter enthusiasts, but that is only because Harry Potter readers are younger overall. There is no need for a government health warning on the cover of Harry Potter books.
[Chapter 12, Vulgar Errors, p. 292-293]
From 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman (Pan Books, 2010, ISBN 9780330511605):
[...] Despite the best of intentions and most extensive prepartions, we all make mistakes. Perhaps you will knock a glass of water into your lap, inadvertantly insult your interviewer or give an answer that is as bumbling as it is unconvincing. The fact is, you need to be able to cope with the odd unexpected answer or two. To help, Thomas Gilovich from Cornell University and his colleagues undertook a series of studies in which they forced people to wear Barry Manilow T-shirts.
[Chapter 2, Persuasion, p. 46]
[Chapter 4, Creativity, p. 140-141]
From It's Your Time You're Wasting: A Teacher's Tales of Classroom Hell by Frank Chalk (Random House Australia, 2008, ISBN 9781741666953):
"No we won't!" yells one boy, near the back of the line. "You can f*ck off!"
Is that kid telepathic?
No, he can't read books, let alone minds.
However, just in case, I form a mental image of me strangling him.
It seems to work: there's a moment of quiet.
Right, that'll do. Seize the moment, like a drowning man grasping at a passing branch.
"OK, in we go. Remember, coats on hooks." They like to keep their coats on at every opportunity, regardless of the ambient temperature, as they provide useful places to conceal things like crisps, phones and spliffs.
[p. 10-11]
Whenever a pupil suggests this, I wholeheartedly agree that I am no longer allowed to be a real teacher "due to an unfortunate incident." If I'm feeling mischievous, I like to add something vague along the lines of, "I have paid my debt to society and that it's all in the past and come along now Wayne, let's see that drawing finished by the end of the lesson." On this occasion, I don't bother gilding the lily.
[p. 228]
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