Darkling Wood

Corollary to Singer and charitable giving?

2011-10-24T15:17:08-05:00

In "The Life You Can Save", Peter Singer poses a simple scenario as a basis for his overall argument that we, the rich, need to get our checkbooks out:

You are walking alongside a lake in a park one sunny afternoon, enjoying the scenery. To your horror, you notice a little girl struggling in the water. No one else is about and only you can save her. However, if you go into the water to save her you will spoil the nice new shoes you bought only the other day and will effectively be losing about $200. If you do not go into the water, the little girl will drown. What do you do?

And of course the rest of his book is based on the assumption that pretty much everyone will respond, "Screw the shoes; of course we'll save the little girl". So let me pose a similar scenario, with only a tiny difference.

You are sitting at the side of a lake in a park one sunny afternoon, enjoying a book. To your horror, you notice a little girl struggling in the water. No one else is about and only you can save her. However, if you go into the water to save her you will have to put down your book and use some of your free time. If you do not go into the water, the little girl will drown. What do you do?

Does Singer's chain of reasoning imply that early retirement -- perhaps *any* retirement -- is morally suspect?

It may go further. Singer's argument over charitable giving does allow for people to give away only some of their surplus, retaining the rest. But you can tell he's not comfortable with that, either for himself or for others. But when we expand the argument from not just money and other such physical resources, but also to our time, it seems to lead inexorably to a pretty fundamental question: What are our lives *for*? Are they for ourselves? For our immediate families? For "others" in general?

Hey, don't look at me; *I* don't know. I only started reading the maniac a month or two ago, and not only is he stressing me out but now I can't even comfort eat chocolate (milk-based, you see) to cheer myself up!

Earthlings

2011-10-23T18:17:35-05:00

So what comes after Singer? Well, I've been digging into the animal side of things first, rather than the charitable giving one. Don't ask me why. The whole shebang is, frankly, confusing. As I said before, if Singer is right on these things, then I'm not sure what's been going on in my head for the first half of my life.

So, first priority after finishing "Animal Liberation" was to find a decent rebuttal. It hasn't been easy. The best I've found so far is Michael Leahy's "Against Liberation: Putting animals in perspective", but by "best" I don't mean "good". Compared with Singer, it's a difficult and unconvincing read. Now it's true that "Animal Liberation" was targeted at a general readership whereas "Against Liberation" is ostensibly more for the academic (it's the sort of book that would use words like "ostensibly"). Still, it's not much of a match. Ignoring style, the arguments quickly get to matters of "rights" versus "interests", and other such subtleties. There's nothing wrong with those things but for me personally they miss the point. Nothing that Singer has argued has made me believe that animals should be allowed to vote, or to have a fair trial -- those being the kinds of things we humans typically defend using the notion of a "right". Nor are his arguments based on the states of minds of animals, or their possession or lack of consciousness. Singer's argument is simple -- we shouldn't stick electric probes up an animal's arse for the same reason we shouldn't stick them up the arse of Norwegians. Sticking electric probes up either's arse causes suffering.

And that is the fundamental challenge and weakness of all of the anti-Singer positions I've seen so far. With all of them, there's no obvious reason why the very same arguments (arguments as to why it's OK to treat animals as we do) cannot be made but first replacing the word "animal" with "black persons" or "persons called Gloria" or "teenage Americans". In other words, none of them do anything to undermine one of the central pillars of the animal liberation position -- that mistreatment of animals is "species-ist".

So I'm still looking for some decent counter arguments to those of Singer and friends. And he has several. After trying to give Leahy a chance, I turned to see if perhaps Singer was just a lone voice. Nope. First I took in "The Omnivore's Dilemma". Less animal welfare and more "be careful what you shove in your face" even it finds problems with the North American methods of farming. And then there was Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals". It's a much rougher ride and takes you to places you'd probably rather not go before having a steak dinner (or drinking a glass of mile for that matter).

But it turns out that was kids stuff compared with what I was about to encounter. Stumbling around YouTube, I came across a snippet of interview of Ellen DeGeneres by Katy Couric.

In the video, DeGeneres talks about how she "forced [herself] to watch a documentary called Earthlings...". So, only slightly perturbed by her reference to forcing herself, I found it on Youtube, but quickly decided to buy a copy to watch on my iPad.

It was fairly late -- I'm a light sleeper and sometimes am awake well past midnight. I started watching it, but began to get a taste of what Ellen was on about. I decided -- and to know me is to know I'm not remotely squeamish -- it would be better done at a time when I wasn't trying to sleep.

I picked up the story earlier this evening. In fact it was while I was eating a veggie meal. As it went on, there was no doubt in my mind what Ellen had meant. In fact I had to stop at one point. Again, I don't want to equate the human Nazi holocaust with factory farming, but I don't think I've experienced such gut wrenching images since I watched Schindler's List.

After a breather, I pushed through and got to the end.

I'm not suggesting you watch this movie. You may not be ready for it. Until a few months ago, I doubt I was. But Singer has wielded a pick axe on some ossified parts of my world view and I can't stop digging and churning until I've figure some things out. If you *do* decide to watch "Earthlings", brace yourself. Unless youre a hunter, or butcher, or in some other way somewhat desensitized to animals being killed (and maybe even if you are), it's harrowing. I'd show some shots from it here, but I know that will have little or no effect. And I don't blame anyone for that. They would have had little or no effect on me too.

Instead, let me show you the effect it had on me as I watched. Yes I had to coordinate the shots a little, but what you're seeing in my face is utterly genuine. I didn't have to make it up. If it looks like there are tears in my eyes, well sorry there weren't. But there could easily have been.

Here then, is me watching Earthlings.

Watching some dude drop a large concrete block on the head of a pig

Another maniac chuckles as he shocks a pig

Blood gushes out from the slit throat of a conscious cow

A little piglet has fallen through the floor of the pen and is drowing in shit and urine

The cow whose throat was slit is still alive despite its entrails now being hauled out in front of it

Cows struggling wildly as their horns get lopped off with bolt cutters

A sow squeals and writhes as a group of laughing "farm" workers club her to death. The screams are woeful.

And then finally:

A live fox is literally skinned alive for its fur. The fully conscious, unstunned animal is held dangling by its feet, head down, and the entire skin is ripped slowly downwards and off in one piece. The raw red underskin is exposed. The animal twitches and shudders. If Singer is right, if Descartes is wrong, the poor beast's agony must be simply indescribable

Towards the end of the interview snippet(3:50), Couric asks DeGeneres if she has seen another documentary, "Food Inc". Ellen response is undramatic but with the slightest hint of "are you *joking*?" in her tone. "Food Inc is like a Disney movie compared with Earthlings", she replies. And although I haven't watched "Food Inc", I imagine she's right.

Old dog, new tricks

2011-08-21T09:57:47-05:00

If I was of a particular Hindu bent, I'd be nearing the end of Grihastha, the second stage of life, and about to enter Vanaprastha, the third. My understanding is that one of the characteristics of this next stage is me sharing my hard-won knowledge with those still in stages 1 and 2. So I'm not sure what to make of it when an older git like me comes across something as new (to me, said older git) and as eye opening as the work of the often controversial Peter Singer.

It started with reading his recent "The Life You Can Save". In a nutshell it's a calm, unemotional, non-judgemental, but still-managing-to-jab-you-in-the-eye-with-a-hot-needle argument for why folk in the rich West, like me, and possibly you, really should be doing a lot more to help -- specifically, giving money to -- the world's poor. I'm not sure why I picked it up. I think it was because of another eye opening part of this mid-point of life, namely moving to the USA.

I've been here for over seven years now and I still believe the US message of liberty is profound and important. But I've observed two interlinked phenomena that leave me feeling bitterly disappointed and a wee bit sick. It was the combination that had left me primed to read Singer.

First, if the USA is the land of the free, then this place isn't the USA. Either that or some lunatics have taken over the place. I came here expecting to hear, and even participate in, the performance of a great symphony of freedom. Instead, I find that most of the musicians can't read their music, half the audience wouldn't know the good stuff even if it was engrossed on parchment and signed by fifty-six old white guys, and a vocal few of my fellow listeners even have the cheek to demand that me suggesting that it was never the composer's intention that the conductor transpose the first violin part up a semitone and have them play it at half speed, backwards means that I don't belong here. They lay on me a charge I've heard increasingly laid on anyone who in criticizing recent developments in the US are deemed to be criticizing the US itself. I've heard it most often from people who I can only assume have either never read the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, or have but have decided it no longer applies. Their criticism is of the form "Love It Or Leave It". And I agree; they should. It's been said before, but if you're willing to trade away your freedom to buy some safety, you don't deserve either.

But the second and sick-inducing phenomenon is the realization is that what the USA is trading away its liberty for isn't actually safety per se. It's property. Stuff. Lexus's and TVs and Burgers, oh my. And it's not just some property, a little property, enough property. It's whatever it takes to satisfy, if that's ever possible, a ravenous, rapacious, revolting appetitite for as much property -- all the property dammit! -- as can be procured legally, bearing in mind that the procurers are also the law makers. Of course I've learned, in my seven years and counting (although at this rate I may well get kicked out by the "Love It Or Leave It" Yahoos) that in a 300 million strong nation, there is no such single thing as "an American". So the reason this second aspect turns my stomach is because whatever subset of the US population is guilty of the greed I describe, it turns out that I'm in it! I live in a 3000+ sq. ft. home; I have four cars, four TVs, and waaay more than enough burgers to provide 2,200 calories a day. Ich bin ein Ugly American!

So it was in that context -- the realization of both what the modern USA really is, and the guilt of seeing that I am part of it -- that led me to gingerly pick up Singer's book. My caution was because I kinda guessed that I was in for a rough ride, and in fact the book lay near the bottom of my "to read" pile for a month before I decided it let it jump the queue and to dive into it. I'm glad I did. It wasn't actually the kick in gut I expected; or rather, it was but the way he delivers it left me wanting more. I'll not say much more about the book itself at this point; leaving that instead for later posts. (I will, however, explain in a second why I'm delaying further exposition.) But with my appetite whetted, I then turned to the internet for more, and came across a Singer video on YouTube where my attention was caught by realizing that his concern for the poor of the world is actually only one manifestation -- and not even the one he is best known for -- of his deeper ethics. Further internexploration led me to what is probably his best known work, "Animal Liberation". I purchased a copy a few days ago and am halfway through. I'm reading it constantly at the moment, fairly riveted. Again, I'll say not much more for now, but maybe later. The reason for that reticence, though, as with for his poverty book, I will explain.

If Singer is right then in terms of helping human poverty I am an utter waste of space. Yes, I give money to charity; yes I'm an entrepreneur who has created jobs; yes I look after my family so no one else has to. But it's nothing -- no really, it's nothing -- in the grand scheme of things. If he's right -- if the accounts of tens of thousands of kids dying each week because of easily treatable conditions such as dehydration, if there really are young women suffering from obstetric fistula (go on, if you're a dad with daughters I challenge you to learn about that condition without developing a lump in your throat or a tear in your eye) -- then what the feck are we doing over here in the USA and Europe!? Really -- what are we thinking? And if he's right about what intensive factory farming -- or CAFOs -- requires us to do to other animals, then good grief what have I been eating for the fast four and half decades? I know, yes, it seems bizarre to speak of the suffering of some chickens and pigs only a few column inches away from talking about some heavy duty human suffering. But that's precisely Singer's point. Read him and you'll see.

If Singer is right then I'm simply embarassed, as at 47 I'm supposed to be preparing for Vanaprastha, to see for the first time what has been staring me in the face for the entire first half of my life. How did I manage to get this far and not notice what he's saying? I was raised a Catholic; at Primary School we regularly donated money to help the sensitively named "Black Babies" (later renamed to the only slightly more sensitive "Holy Childhood") in Africa and other such far away places. I know about poverty. And I don't know how many times I've been accosted on a Saturday afternoon on Glasgow's Sauchiehall ("sucky-hall" for you American types) Street by fanatical animal rights people shoving pictures in my face of monkeys in electric-shock-inducing apparatus. I know about animal experimentation etc. Whatever.

But the problem is, I have lived half my life without this stuff seriously impinging on my life. So that demands an explanation, and one possible explanation is that Singer isn't right. It doesn't make sense -- it's just not good science -- to ditch 47 years of world view on the reading of a couple of books, however well delivered, on such emotive subjects. And so I need some time to think about it. For one thing, I need to find some counters to Singer -- some good thinkers who can do for the defence what Singer is doing for the prosecution. I'd like to read someone of opposing views who can match what a New York Time Book Review said of Singer's "Animal Liberation":

"[His] documentation is unrhetorical and unemotional, his arguments tight and formidable, for he bases his case on neither personal nor religious nor highly abstract philosophical principles, but on moral positions most of us already accept".

If any of you know of such counters -- or if you have or would like to read Singer and then provide the counters yourself -- I'd be much obliged. In the meantime, I'll keep reading, pondering, and negotiating the darkling wood.

Bunnies, bunnies, bunnies...

2011-07-04T19:26:12-05:00

My younger daughter has dropped her pet rabbit off for a few weeks while she goes off and prepares to get married and stuff. Bunny came with a litter box, a traveling cage, and that's about it. She's a "house" bunny, so tends to run about the place at my daughter's college apartment. So I decided -- who knows why -- I wanted to give it something that got a better balance between being stuck in a wee cage on the one hand, and running all over the place on the other hand, crapping on the furniture as she went.

I think I may have got a bit carried away.

It's built from the modular wire cubes you get from Target and a bunch of other places. A box of 24 wire "sides" costs $20; there are 59 such sides in what you see, so the wire skeleton for the whole thing cost $60 -- three boxes.The wire sides come with little plastic connectors, but they're not strong enough to build that size of structure. So instead I used 8" electrical ties to hold it all together. The rest is some wood from Home Depot (pegboard-style hardboard for the "floors", and some cheap pine for those supporting rods), and a piece of cheap carpet (tight weave so the stupid animal doesn't eat it) from Lowes. Total cost was probably under $125.

I got the idea from here, here, and here. That last one is labeled "large", which means mine may qualify as "humongous".

As I say, I don't know why I did it. I'm treating it as some kind of jigsaw puzzle (which is equally senseless if you ask me, but at least thinking of it in those terms means I'm not alone in my insanity).

Why I (Still) Don't Take The News

2011-05-15T14:44:37-05:00

I mentioned I'd stopped looking at news. Nothing's changed there, but on whim, on a quiet Sunday afternoon just before 2:00pm, I thought I'd turn on the TV and find out what I've been missing in the world. SInce I don't actively seek out "news", and rely instead on absorbing information by osmosis, all I'm aware of are things like people being killed by tornados and their houses being blown to bits or thrown up trees, or the death of Osama bin Laden, or some new trouble around Israel's borders, or even the fact that the US President was in Austin last week (I got stuck in my office as his motorcade passed).

But what important stuff might I be missing? So, I turned on to channels 46 (CNN), 47 (Headline News) and 48 (Fox). Here's what I got:

CNN: Katie Couric's contract is up and she's not renewing. Note: Couric is a news anchor. So here I'm pretty much getting only news about the news.

HLN: Some new photos of Michael Jackson have been found. Not sure where that fits in significance alongside tornados or bin Laden or Israel.

FOX: All I got here were ads.

Now granted, it's Sunday and a few minutes before the hour. Hardly the heart of the action. So I hung on for five minutes until we hit the start of the hour slot. CNN and FOX had moved off news, leaving me only with HLN. Here's what I got (and remember, this is "headline" news):

First item: floods in Lousiana. Now I'd already picked up on this, by osmosis as I said. And since I don't watch news, I can't tell if this was news of the form "Elvis is *still* dead", or if it was actually "NEW". But fair enough, not much to complain about here although I could have waited until this evening.

Second item: Casey Anthony trial has been delayed. Also one of the potential jurors isn't going to be a juror because her son died and she feels that wouldn't make her objective. Or maybe she *is* going to be a juror. Whatever. OK, so of all the bad news in the world, the one that hits me in the gut the most is the abduction and death of little kids. The story of Jamie Bulger is worse than any horror movie. And I still remember being on vacation in the south of England the year Sarah Payne was taken, keeping an even more watchful eye than usual on my own kids and the kids of my friends who were staying with us, and looing at every white van that passed in case it was the one we'd been told on the news to look out for. But despite that, or maybe because of it, I don't want to hear every morsel of news on these cases. I especially don't want daily news on any one specific case. It feels like news and it sounds like news, but it isn't. At most I'm content to know that it happened, have an overview of the case and the verdict, and, most important, a context into which I can place it: namely, beware the availability heuristic because stereotypical child abductions are rare events.

Third item: a paralyzed student was able to walk a bit to accept his graduation. Remember, this is the third item of news on a nationally broadcast channel. Sorry, but heart-warming as the story is, it's not news.

Fourth item: Billy Graham is feeling better. I rest my case.

Conclusion, waste of time and energy. The simple fact is that at 2:00pm on Sunday May 15th 2011, if that's all the news there is, then there IS NO NEWS. When I was little ("it's a good story grand'pa"), sometimes the TV stations simply stopped broadcasting for a while. Y'all news people now have my permission to return to those halcyon times and wheesht. To misquote Wittgenstein, "Whereof one has nothing useful to say, thereon one should simply shut the feck up and give us all peace".

On Libraries

2011-05-07T21:25:23-05:00

I joined my local public library today. My wife had gone shopping and told me to "go to the bookstore" (code for "and stay out my way"), but on the way to the nearest Barnes & Noble I passed the Bee Cave library. I've passed it umpteen times before, but I slowed down this time, peered in, and decided to go find out what was going on.

It's a small library, and a stand alone one at that. "You'll borrow from here and you'll return to here", the stern lady behind the counter warned me as she handed me the application form. The tacet "or else" was clear. So although they do have access to an Inter Library Loan facility, I decided to take my new library card on a quick tour of the contents. The books around me were, it seemed, pretty much what I'd have to play with. But the tour quickly morphed into a stroll down a personal library memory lane. I realized that other than the fact that almost 100% of the history books were on American history, I might as well have been paying my first visit, 42 years ago, to my very first public library in Johnston Castle, Scotland.

Johnston Castle was -- still is in part -- a small government housing area in Scotland, just east of Paisley (of "pattern" fame). I lived there, Pine Crescent, from just after I was born until I was nine. It was in the Community Center, just across from my house, that my first library lived. Mrs Ballantyne was the head librarian. She was 65. Actually, she was nearer 25, but at my tender age of 5 there were only three age groups: "same age as me"; "grown up", by which I meant 12; and "old", which was synonymous with 65 but covered everyone from my 25-ish parents and up. Mrs Ballantyne was old. But she was also jolly. Later on I'd attend her "story time" classes at the library, but what I most remember was her smiling and being excited about books. Suited me, because I was delirious about them.

I think I'd been dying to get into the library for ages. My friends and I used to play hide and seek and "kick the can" around the bushes and doorways of the Community Centre, and sometimes we'd peer in through the tall thin windows on the 1960's style building and see the book-filled interior. But I reckon there must have been a minimum age of 5 for membership, so I had to wait. The day it happened, my mum took me across the street, in through the Center doors, turning left and into the library itself. I don't remember much of the joining itself; all I remember is making a beeline to the children's books and noticing it was right next to one of the windows we'd previously peered through. I specifically remember it because at the base of the outside of the window was growing the spiny, yellow flowered version of what was probably a type of contoneaster. It was the perfect kind for catching bees in jam jars, which was another pastime of ours, as we waited to come of age for the library.

I was drooling at the books. I've always been glad, then and now, that modern books come in all shapes and sizes and colours. Yes, sure, there's something impressive about grand libraries with those wheeled ladders that whiz across shelves filled with leather-bound books all alike, all grey or brown or green. But better still is the swirly kalaidescope of colour you get from real books.

Despite the swirl, I think I picked my first book quickly. It was Tommy Gets A Medal, by Dora Thatcher. It was about a tugboat called Tommy. Who got a medal. (Hey, it was a long time ago!) That said, I took a mental note that one day, "when I was grown up", I was going to borrow a huge tome, with scarily lifelike picture on the front of an Alice-In-Wonderland-style queen attacking a pawn, called Chess For Children. Huge tomes have always impressed me. Later, in Mrs McCreadie's Primary 3 class I would hum and haver for weeks before having the courage to take home the simply hyoooooj hardback copy of The Mountain Of Adventure, by Enid Blyton. Ah Enid Blyton. Don't dare say a bad thing about her. On my list of all time favourite books, The Enchanted Wood is up there, along with Five Go Off In A Caravan and another of the Philip/Dinah/Jack/Lucy-Anne series, The Valley of Adventure.

But anyway, where was I? Oh right: back in Johnstone Castle Library, Mum and I departed with my newly borrowed book and that's pretty much all I remember. However, a postscript to the main story was provided by my mum years later. Apparently an hour after we'd returned home, I appeared at the kitchen door and anounced that we had to go back because I'd finished the book. She wouldn't believe me at first and proceeded to quiz me on the contents. It seems I passed the impromptu exam with flying colours and we returned to get some more books. So began my relationship with words on paper. It wasn't the last time my rapid reading was to threaten to screw up the card-based borrowing system at Johnstone by having me try to return books before their cards had moved from the "just borrowed" drawer to the "ready to be returned" drawer. A year or two later, during an early morning visit I'd borrowed three books on rocks, minerals and fossils. By lunchtime I realized I was going to find neither amethyst nor trilobites in my back garden,and so I announced to my Grandma, who was visiting while mum was out, that I had to go back to the library to change the books. Grandma insisted that they wouldn't allow it and no amount of complaining "But Grandma, I know Missus Ballantyne!" would convince her to let me go and change them.

At 9, my family and I moved up in the world and hopped from Johnstone Castle all the way to Spateston, a brand spanking new government scheme about two miles from "The Castle". Like Johnstone, Spateston had its Community Center, complete with library, but the latter was a good five minute walk from my new house. We were, as I said, moving up in the world.

My main memory of Spateston library was trying to get into the "adult" section. Now it's true I was a growing healthy male, but I was still only nine for heaven's sake. So when I say "adult" I mean only the main part of the library. I was getting fed up with Enid Blyton -- well, no, hang on; not fed up so much as looking for additional material -- and I'd long since lost interest in Tommy The Tugboat or The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Aside: one kids' book I do remember was an obscure but modern fairy tale from, it turns out, The Netherlands: The Seven Times Search. Weird book, but a nice story. If you've read it, you'll know what I mean. But no, I was now too grown up for such things. Instead, I lusted after two particular sections in the main library. One I remember primarily by its Dewey Decimal classification; section 745. Strictly that is "Decorative Arts" but the local librarians stuffed anything in there to do with "making stuff". They also managed to chuck in there books on home-grown scientific experiments. Although I wasn't allowed to borrow from the adult section, when the librarians were distracted I used to sneak in and pore over two books in particular. One contained instructions for constructing your own cloud chamber with which to observe radiation trails from the radium paint in watch dials. Little did I know that modern luminous watches didn't use radium and in fact weren't really luminous any more. The other 745 book explained how to build a computer. This was the early 70's mind, so there was nine-year-old me in Johnstone, Scotland, perhaps one of the earliest participants in "Slightly Raised Temperature In The Glen", the Celtic version of the larger "Fire In The Valley" getting off the ground over in California.

The other adult book section I was targetting was one that two of my friends, Barry Conway and John Houston were also after: conjuring. While the kids sections had a few books on card tricks, and the odd piece of close-up magic, we'd all three devoured them all. In our quests to beat the other two, and come up with tricks the others hadn't seen, we all had our eyes on the treasures of the main conjuring section. Unfortunately it, unlike section 745, was in plain view of the librarians' work area, so you had to be smart to get a look. A specific book I remember was Joseph Dunninger's Complete Encyclopedia of Magic. It wasn't really an instructional book, but it had such a look of being a long-lost secret that I reckoned it held the key to dominance among the three of us. Try as we might, the most any of us could manage was an extended look at the book while in the library. Realizing that we were unlikely to get into the main section for real, Barry tried a different tack. He told me he'd had an exception made and had been allowed to join the main section early. I think by now we were about 11, and the age for joining the main section was 12. So I marched up to the librarian, indignant, and demanded to be let in "just like my friend Barry". Of course Barry had been fibbing and I was told in no uncertain terms by the librarian that it was "Against The Law!" to be allowed in before we reached 12. From then on, even our furtive visits were more difficult since she kept a more careful eye on us.

Within a year or so, adult section became just "the library", and I could read what I wanted. I read every 745.xxx book, and every conjuring book. Geology fell next; and then military history and miniature wargaming. Yay Don Featherstone! Before long the vast expanses of the main library seemed small again. But then came Paisley.

In high school (7th through 12th grade in US terms) I played Double Bass. (I wanted to play clarinet, but they didn't have enough spaces, so they gave me the nearest thing they could find...). Every Saturday morning I'd get the bus into the nearby metropolis of Paisley, where I'd have a Double Bass lesson. Often I'd bus back, but occasionally I'd walk. The distance from Paisley Grammar School where my lesson was, to home, was only 5.5 miles. On one such walk I popped in to look at fossils at Paisley Museum. I'd been there a few times and had even sbmitted for identification a fossil I'd found near Swanage. I'd actually passed it by my high school history teacher first, thinking that he'd be the nearest I could get to a paleontologist. When he told me he thought it might be a bit of a bird's wing I knew I'd asked the wrong guy. It was a section of ammonite ... but I digress. Anyway, exiting from the museum I noticed that there was a library next door. In fact I already knew it was there, but I guess I'd always thought it was a private thing -- not like my libraries back in Johnstone Castle or Spateston. For whatever reason, I decided this time I'd have a look. Pushing through the heavy outer doors, I think I had to turn to the left and open an inner door. Turn again to the right and: Oh, My, Go'.

My eyes opened wide, my head and upper jaw lifted towards the ceiling, and my lower jaw remained parallel to the floor to which it may as well have been stapled. To the small-town boy from small-town libraries, it was quite literally jaw-dropping. I had never seen so many books in one place. Books upon books, to the left, ahead of me, and to my right. Then I realized that the books on my right were the kids section, but a kids section bigger than the entire library in Spateston. Books above me too -- there was an entire balcony of books, running along three walls of the entire cave-like space. I don't know how many double-takes I double took or how long I stood gaping.

I stumbled forward, part in a daze, part with a grin on my face, and stopped at the vast central desk area where what I assumed must be an elite class of ueber librarians milled about, Gringots-goblin-like in their serious, book-ish diligence. I don't remember much about the joining itself, but that library became a regular haunt for me after that. I borrowed books on learning Russian ("вот дом" anyone?), on anything to do with escaping from German POW camps in WW2, on cryptography, and on science and science and science.

Post high school, libraries became less of a source of wonder, and more just part of daily life. Experiencing the eight-floor main library at Glasgow University would have been truly sublime had I encountered it as a young boy from Johnstone Castle. But by the time I arrived at the Uni, Paisley had prepared me for it and while it was cool -- even in the micro-fiche days before computerization -- it was just a bigger version of what I'd become used to.

Post university, apart from a brief fling with libraries in and around Glasgow, my relationship with these public book repositories diminished rapidly. The novelty in Glasgow was you could borrow from any library in the system and return to any. It was nice to begin with because it made even the Paisley library seem small. But it soon wore off. Or rather, it was overshadowed by my increasing ability to own books. And it wasn't just ability; my desire to own the books must have increased. Even today, I find the single biggest obstacle to buying for and reading on my Kindle is DRM. Something in me, probably irrational I admit, objects to paying for a right to read that is forever subject to the existence of a decryption capability that is controlled by someone else. In the past, the hardest problem we had to face in reading stuff was finding the Rosetta stone. I pity the poor future archeologist who stumbles upon Triple-DES encrypted books.

And it's maybe that -- noticing and finding myself increasingly uneasy with the change in my self from being someone who was happy to live in a world of shared books to someone who wanted them to be "mine, all mine ah tell ye!" -- that led me to pop into Bee Cave library today, and to fill out the stern lady's form. It's probably part of a deeper set of changes that only become available on reaching and moving beyond this, the mid-point of life. The cool thing about this curious halfway house is that there's enough life already lived to let one pick out patterns, know strengths, make peace with weakness; but also enough remaining ahead, Insha'Allah, to let the past inform the future.

Absolute Power

2011-05-06T00:56:26-05:00

Whether bin Laden's death was specifically ordered or merely accidental, surely now, the first time ever that a single group of humans -- and maybe one alone -- has the ability if not the intent to name any other human on the planet and to order the latter's death, we should wish Acton were wrong.

Lessons in Sco'ish #1

2011-04-27T18:49:00-05:00

Apropos nothing, I feel a need to correct some popular misconceptions about Scottish pronunciation. Of course there is no more a single way of pronouncing something in Scotland than there is in Texas, say. So what follows will have a Glasgow bent. Still, it's better than a Scottie-From-Star-Trek-Bent.

First let's deal with the commonly heard shortened version of "of", written " o' ". The normal non-Scots way pronounces that as "oh". But that's clearly wrong. Do you pronounce "of" as "oave"? No, well neither do the Scots. Ross, here, shows how not to do it:

To get it right, first note that in Glasgow not only is "of" not pronounced "oav", it's not always pronounced "awv" either. The exact pronounciation varies, but it's frequently something like "uhv" as in:

"Uhv course ahm no' English!"

So the shortened version would then be:

"Uh' course ahm no' English!"

or:

"Oh Flower uh' Scotland, when wull we see, yur likes again..."

or, less rabidly nationalistically:

"Ahm gaspin fur a cup uh' tea"

From which it's easy to see that Ross's line should really have been not:

"A wee bit oh' celebration"

but rather:

"A wee bit uh' celebration"

Of course that's still not quite right, because a native Glaswegian would replace the "t" in "bit" with our famous Sco'ish glottal stop:

"A wee bi' uh' celebration" (where the "bi" is "bih" and not "buy")

That in turn exposes the " uh' " as being overly long and just too fancy for a true Scot, especially if treated separately from the preceding " bi' " The proper rendition would be something between:

"A wee bi'uh' celebration"

and

"A wee bi'i' celebration"

or less commonly:

"A wee bi'ay' celebration"

To move any of the above towards the East of the country, just add the word "ken?" to the end.

Happy Birthday To Us

2011-04-25T07:15:32-05:00

My company, Verilab, is eleven years old. Please send cakes and stuff to the usual address.

We're not in Scotland anymore

2011-04-04T07:45:28-05:00

It's Monday, April 4th. Just look at the number of things in the following that simply wouldn't happen in Glasgow:

It's 7:15am and I'm sitting outside (#1), feeling the gentle warmth of the morning (#2), drinking tea and waiting to see my newly installed lawn sprinklers come on (#3). I can feel the patio is merely warm (#4) through my socks, unlike the veritably toasty it would have been over the weekend (#5). Despite the warmth, a big thunderstorm is gathering (#6 -- no, no, I mean *big*). I start to wonder if it could bring the not uncommon load of golfball-or-larger sized hail (#7), requiring the car to be put into the garage. So I check the weather pages to get ... well take a look at this:

Look at that. An hourly forecast (#8). An *hourly* forecast! Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir WInston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana, Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me, Maggie Thatcher? Your weather forecast took a hell of a beating!