spreading knowledge

15/04/16755926239_953a9b96ef_z.jpg&h=426 By Hilary Smith, Sustainability Resource Center For many students, spring break was a time for relaxing, catching up on homework, or partying. Not so for a group of 20 U of U students and community members, who spent the week off from school—plus a few extra days—teaching community members in rural Honduras the ins and outs of community banking and small business management. https:// sustainableutah.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/16299582824_8722f6d457_z.jpg The group’s departure marked the U of U’s first mission with Global Brigades, a 12-year-old international organization that aims to build sustainable, holistic communities through development projects in Ghana, Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras. Today, there are about 450 active Global Brigades chapters, in the United States, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland. Almost 40,000 volunteers have participated in more than 2,000 trips since the organization was established. The organization operates under the hope that after a few trips to a given site, the brigades will have worked themselves out of a job. On May 9, a second brigade, including 15 students from the U of U and 10 from the University of Miami, Fla., will depart for a yet-to-be-determined site in rural Panama. They will spend seven days providing community members with basic medical and dental assistance and health

15/04/16755926239_953a9b96ef_z.jpg&h=426 By Hilary Smith, Sustainability Resource Center For many students, spring break was a time for relaxing, catching up on homework, or partying. Not so for a group of 20 U of U students and community members, who spent the week off from school—plus a few extra days—teaching community members in rural Honduras the ins and outs of community banking and small business management. https:// sustainableutah.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/16299582824_8722f6d457_z.jpg The group’s departure marked the U of U’s first mission with Global Brigades, a 12-year-old international organization that aims to build sustainable, holistic communities through development projects in Ghana, Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras. Today, there are about 450 active Global Brigades chapters, in the United States, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland. Almost 40,000 volunteers have participated in more than 2,000 trips since the organization was established. The organization operates under the hope that after a few trips to a given site, the brigades will have worked themselves out of a job. On May 9, a second brigade, including 15 students from the U of U and 10 from the University of Miami, Fla., will depart for a yet-to-be-determined site in rural Panama. They will spend seven days providing community members with basic medical and dental assistance and health

POTENT APHRODISIAC

Tax Code Found to Be Safe Yet Potent Aphrodisiac by conchapman WASHINGTON, D.C. It’s getting close to tax time, and across the nation women are nursing two-month-old babies they delivered in January. “You are the cutest widdle $3,200 deduction from ordinary income mommy’s ever seen!”   Demographers have noticed that a disproportionate number of the nation’s children are born during the first month of the year, and the Internal Revenue Service believes it has discovered why. Shulman: “The tax code has always been a tremendous turn-on for me personally.” “Our nation’s tax code, while complex, can be a safe but potent means of increasing the libido of married couples who file joint returns,” said former IRS Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman. “There’s the fighting over ‘Why don’t you make more money?’ and then–the make-up sex.” Looking at naughty forms on the IRS website helps couples get in the mood. Taxpayers seem to agree with Stiff’s analysis. Linda Barnes of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, says tax time is a period of increased intimacy with her husband Duane, who prepares their taxes using off-the-shelf software. “Just say it real slow and sultry-like–‘Turbotax–Turbotax’. It kinda gets to you.” Church ice cream social: “Lloyd, is that an ice cream cone in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” Others say they use the stimulus of tax preparation to avoid the side effects of other erectile dysfunction remedies. “My husband Lloyd thought he was going blind from Viagra,” says Cindi Kennon of Hoxie, Arkansas, “and with Cialis he’d walk around all weekend with a lump in his pants–not good for a Sunday night ice cream social,” at the Bethany Baptist Church where the Kennons worship. “On the other hand, alcohol is like prunes–is two beers enough? Is six too many? You never know.” Muu-Muus: Also available in men’s sizes. There are even couples who use tax-based role playing to add an extra kick to the Internal Revenue Code’s 9,545 pages of erotic stimulus. “We introduce cross-dressing into our love-making routine during April,” says Anna Simon of Grosse Point, Michigan. “I buy my husband Jim some plus-size panty hose and a muu-muu, and he plays the poor, pitiful housewife while I pretend I’m an IRS auditor.” After scolding him for improper deductions of commuting expenses from W-2 wages, Mrs. Simon spanks her husband and allows him to file an amended return correcting his error. “All of our private suites are booked right now, but I can put you on the table in the conference room.” Tax-preparation giant H&R Block says it will add private “consultation” rooms to its offices to handle the needs of couples whose personal tastes include exhibitionism. “The guys come in here and want to show me how big their mortgage interest deductions are,” said branch manager Herb Webb of the firm’s Council Bluffs, Iowa office. “Frankly, they don’t pay me enough to watch that kind of sicko stuff.” Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Death, Taxes and More Taxes.”

KINTSUKUROI

Kintsukuroi I am broken open Shards litter, splinters glitter Nothing is me anymore. Everything is me from before. Do not sweep me up Or step over my pieces - Look at me. Look. At. Me. And hold back your broom. For I will pick myself up. I will gather my pieces with love and anger From the fire that burns in me And I will rise. I. Will. Rise. There is gold in my veins Gold that has settled into the million tiny cuts Of a million tiny words That almost bled me dry. Gold. And if you would love me; If you would be the one to walk alongside me As that gold is beaten till it gleams, Be equal to the task. I am done with less than, with second-best, with good enough. I am done with eggshells and backbends and silence. I am enough. I am complete. I am perfectly and wonderfully made. And I will rise.  

And the. toaster thought............

And the Toaster Thought… by Liam Wood I read an article the other day about dialogue and blocking.  I have since lost track of it, but its premise struck me: dialogue in a narrative is not the same as dialogue in a movie.  It's simple, but profound, and it's something I often overlook since I experience stories so often through both film and book. First off, a couple definitions.  Dialogue is the collection of words characters say— hi, how are you, where's my cat, and so forth.  Blocking fills the gaps in the conversation, most notably answering this question: who is speaking right now?  The simplest blocking is a dialogue tag.  "Find me a stick," he said.  "This is space, I don't have a stick," she replied.  But ending or beginning every line of dialogue with '[pronoun] said/cried/etc.' can get boring.  As you seek to spice it up a little, or as your characters move while they speak, you can put action as blocking instead of a tag.  "By all my calculations, Sergeant Roberts actually needs a stick."  The robot scratched its titanium head.  "Maybe a candlestick?" In a script, for film or stage, blocking tells the actor what to do, what emotions they should portray.  Here a frown, there a shrug, perhaps now it's time for a tango?  You see that blocking on the screen as you hear the actor's lines.  The two are simultaneous. Books, on the other hand, can never achieve that.  You can only write one sentence at a time— even if you break the sentence in two parts to put some blocking in, the words and the actions don't happen simultaneously.  The reader's imagination, however, fills this in.  Many times, in fact, I've read along and found myself imagining faces or gestures the character should be making, based on the words she was saying.  Because the writer didn't want to chop up the character's words, that blocking never saw the page. My point is, the dialogue/blocking mix in film is different from the dialogue/blocking mix in books.  But the simultaneous stuff isn't actually the thing.  Books and verbal storytelling have another advantage that movies cannot use effectively: the character's actual thoughts and emotions. Read more of this post

TECO BELL "ROUTINE REPUBLIC" ad

Taco Bell’s “Routine Republic” Ad and the Discourse of Post-Post-Capitalism by rosslangager Taco Bell, it turns out, is rolling out a breakfast menu. This is precisely the sort of leading-edge current events revelation that you come to this blog to hear about, I'm sure. What sort of items are offered for breakfast at Taco Bell? I could probably do some googling and then tell you, but it doesn't really matter, since you're probably not going to eat them anyway. The truly important thing to know about Taco Bell's new breakfast menu is that this brain-scrambling, utterly brazen "short film" commercial advertisement has been conceived of, shot, and released to promote it. Watch. Just... watch. There it is: one billion-dollar fast-food corporation selling unhealthy, standardized assembly-line nutriments (Taco Bell) artfully accusing another billion-dollar fast-food corporation of selling unhealthy, standardized assembly-line nutriments (McDonald's, the evident target of "Routine Republic"). Not only that, but the accusation metastasizes into a hyperbolic but imaginative and compelling portrait of the mass hawking of inferior conformist breakfast sandwiches as undergirding a bleak, greyscale totalitarian dictatorial state run by jackbooted McRed Army clowns and suffused with Soviet-style pro-regime propaganda urging conformity and routine. Two Young Adult dystopian fiction types rebel against this authoritarian order and take a runner for a bell-ringing utopia surrounded by green fields, where other free-spirited bright young things smile and chat al fresco in an old European piazza and chow down on Crunchwrap Huevos Supremes or whatever the heck is inside that hexagonal tortilla. There's so much to unpack here, one hardly knows where to begin. We'll leave aside the above observation that Taco Bell and McDonald's are marketing pretty much the same thing when you get right down to it (and even if you don't), and will try not to get too bogged down in advertising agency Deutsch's audacious conceit that Taco Bell's fare represents some food-borne embodiment of wild-eyed freedom and individualism when compared to the oppressive conformity of McDonald's drab factory food product. That particular twist in the discourse is prime-grade "rebel sell" material at its most unthoughtful and cynical and is not really terribly interesting except in the magnitude of its bald-faced hypocrisy, which must surely be at least partially ironic in scope. Corporate advertising has long emphasized the freedom of choice represented by the product at hand while corporate distribution and retail enforces an inflexible order of consumption, and this is not much different. But "Routine Republic" establishes the favoured product's liberating potential in contrast to the rigid imposition from above that characterizes the product and supporting presentation favoured by its (much more successful) competitor. The ad depicts the drained Iron Curtain quotidian reality of this McState in extremely clever and biting detail, and this depiction is the most salient feature of "Routine Republic". Indeed, it winds up feeling more like the ad's raison d'être than the promotion of the client's product; "Routine Republic" is more a hit piece against McDonald's than it is a commercial for Taco Bell. In this way as well as for its mock-serious characterization of minor divergences in corporate policy as tantamount to Orwellian oppressive absolutism, "Routine Republic" is deeply indebted to Apple's legendary "1984" ad for its first Macintosh (which has now accrued an almost unbearable weight of irony, considering Apple's latter-day rigid regime of tech hegemony). Thus, the Routine Republic is a realm of stark industrial tower blocks and shuffling queues of mundanely depressed drone citizens, awaiting their limp, unsatisfying slab of morning protein and carbohydrates. Overseen by an eager voyeuristic face-painted commander (let's call him Ronald McBrezhnev) at the pinnacle of a panoptic tower, clown-faced military underlings stand at the ready to punish any deviation from collective order, and indeed spring into action when our revolutionary heroes bolt from the food line. Peeling, discoloured propaganda posters blanket the walls on either side of the penitentiary-type yard, extolling the virtues of the morningtime mass mandate with the primary warning colours of Communism (and, eerily, also of McD's) and overcompensatory images of populist contentment (as you can see to the right and below on the left). This latter critique of McDonald's image-making is the sharpest and most sophisticated offered up by "Routine Republic", and the most lingering and unsettling comparison to authoritarian regimes. McDonald's and Communist states alike cultivate aggressive public imagery of happiness, depicting their customers/comrades as smiling, cheerful multitudes uplifted by the beneficent regard of their monolithic patron. The inverted double-smile logo, the Happy Meals, the in-restaurant play-zones, the overt appeals to childlike delight and frequent tie-in deals with Disney entertainment (another multinational corporation with an aggressively cheerful public face); McDonald's presents itself as a conduit of happiness above all. "Routine Republic" turns this self-presentation on its head, likening it directly to the similar and fundamentally dishonest self-presentation of Communist regimes as essentially positive shepherds of a contented flock of citizens. The tokens of happiness in the Routine Republic are twisted into mechanisms of hegemonic oppression. The surveillance tower includes a yellow corkscrew slide, down which the subalterns of centralized power (painted clowns which trade on the countercultural conception of these makers of merry as figures of horror) slip to chase down the dissenters. To escape the Republic, the dissenters must cross a moat filled with multichromatic plastic balls, a liminal border between slavery and freedom like an inverted funhouse Berlin Wall. The discourse of happiness that supports and elides both McDonald's mass-produced digestive misery and authoritarianism's mass-produced social misery is exposed as a thin veneer of spin which will be brutally enforced by state violence; consumption is not a path to happiness any more than collectivism. Punchdrunk with its own galloping wit, "Routine Republic" goes much farther than it intends to into a sneering outright critique of American capitalism's very core. The aforementioned Taco Bell Town that the dissenters escape to, heralded by the company's trademarked bell gong sound, is a literal city upon a hill, hearkening back to the Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop's biblical invocation of the new land his people were settling as a shining example of Christian-infused American exceptionalism. The idea has been repurposed by many subsequent American political leaders (most notably the noted Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan), but "Routine Republic" inverts it almost inadvertently. Tacotopia is inhabited by joyous and beautiful multicultural sun-children, contentedly feeding on the re-packaged "distinctive" cuisine of America's much-maligned underclass southern neighbour in a distinctly Old World urban setting (prompting a brusque question: Has anyone at Deutsch ever been in a Taco Bell?). The City of Breakfast Liberty upon the Hill is effectively marked as inherently foreign to common American experience, while the sphere of influence of the American corporate brand par excellence is marked as inherently oppressive and prison-like. The Routine Republic is the America of McDonald's, and Taco Bell seeks to free its shackled masses yearning to breathe free with an infusion of international (ie. UnAmerican) flavour. Taco Bell's one-time tagline "Run for the Border" takes on a brave new dimension from this perspective, coloured more than a little by the contours of the Blue State/Red State culture war. One must "run for the border" (metaphorically/culinarily at least) to evade the stifling conformity of McDonaldized America, the ad suggests. There are many historical ironies and criss-crossing discourses at work in "Routine Republic", and many (though likely not all) have found their way into this discussion of its implications. It is worth noting one in particular, which is the historical symbolism of the penetration of the McDonald's brand into markets like post-Soviet Russia and limited-free-market China. More than any other corporation (even than its corporate partner Coca Cola), McDonald's came to represent the terms of the freedom represented by American consumer capitalism as opposed to the oppression of the Communist bloc. That implication deserves to be challenged, but even those who do so must acknowledge its ingrained prominence. The deepest irony of "Routine Republic", then, is that the company that once represented a shaft of capitalist light in the centrally-planned darkness behind the Iron Curtain is being characterized as embodying a contemporary resurrection of that darkness. And that characterization comes not from radical Left anti-capitalist activists but from a market rival that differs from the target of their withering criticism more in scale than in methodology or practice. Our current social, economic, and cultural moment is sometimes termed post-capitalism, but advertising discourse like "Routine Republic" might herald nothing less than a species of post-post-capitalism. ro

THE APPLE

 the Apple
 by m lewis redford    



 Teaching and learning can ONLY happen organically - when infused, before, during and after, with an understanding of how a mind builds its cognitive structure.   It's simple: Knowledge >>> Understanding >>> Evaluation (KUE; actually I wonder if 'Exploration' is a better word than 'Evaluation', less preclusive, more open).   You can teach unorganically, reductively, intensively (as in, farming), results-led (value-bled).   It is much easier to measure (and therefore be used as political manure) like this.   But the learning becomes Pavlovian - set stimulae, set responses to get the grade - pupils are given the knowledge, and they learn (= remember) it, or not.   Pupils are also given the Understanding and the Evaluation/Exploration, and they learn/remember that as well, or not.   They are not taught, as such, but are Educationally Behaved.   Organic education is ... the teacher's apple (look at the shape of the diagram).   Preparing: teaching is the unpacking of (already established and recognised) knowledge.   Unpacking happens every lesson, beginning with the identification of the Learning Objective (Learning Horizon) from the curriculum.   Having focussed on the horizon, the map to it is opened-out by the teacher.   The map is the structure/template through which to unpack knowledge – the components of Knowledge, Understanding and Evaluation (KUE) which are the structure and levels of cognitive learning – and this map is the PLANNED lesson.   The way to write the map is to start with the learning objective and ask three sets of questions which deconstruct it into its constituent cognitive components – what are the facts (K), how do they work (U), what are the issues (E)?   The answers to these questions yield the raw ingredients of the lesson.   This level of analysis is conceptual and learned and requires a mastery of the subject in order to achieve it, clearly and efficiently. Tasking: then comes the creativity in the lesson planning.   Working from the raw ingredients you ask: how could the pupil find, identify, collect, collate etc. the facts of the topic (knowledge), how could the pupil connect the facts together to see how the topic functions (understanding), how might the connections be tested to evaluate the functionality of the topic (evaluation)?   What is different about this stage of questioning is that you are thinking of questions that enable pupils to make the discovery themselves – the creativity is in the enabling, thinking of tasks that let them work the cognitive way back to the learning objective from discovery (of facts features - knowledge) through linking (the knowledge - understanding) to playing (with the links - evaluation).   If the tasks do not allow discovery/linking/playing then they have lost reference to what they were trying to achieve (the Way to the learning objective) and they become directionless and pointless – there is activity, but it is not clear why it is being done even though it may have some related or recognisable association with the learning objective.   The key, therefore, to this stage of lesson planning, is to build not any-old tasks that keep them occupied for a lesson, but tasks which ‘window’ the discovery, ‘thread’ the linking and ‘allow’ the play: growth.   If you ask the right questions in the lesson, the learning will grow itself.   Once you have got the questions right, only then do you think about resources and delivery – a mere formality after the main work of questioning has been done. Lesson: then comes the magic of the lesson.   The pupil works as far as s/he can through the lesson (K > U > E) and checks their progress through feedback which is phrased in the same KUE references.   The journey is made naturally if the lesson has been constructed right ( // the questions have been posed organically).   There is no chore here (in the sense of work for a deferred or prospective outcome), there is the momentum of: what-is-it, how-does-it-work, let’s-play-with-it?   The learning should develop through stages of integration: having found things (discovery), you see how those things fit together (how they work, function), then you test how they fit together (practise their use if the subject is a skill, develop their use if the subject is a study).   There should be no sense of having to lead-the-horse-to-water, the only thing holding back the pupil will be h/er current cognitive development.* *There are some pupils with a measured low cognitive ability (i.e. CAT score), or low ability to develop (SEN), who, indeed, are ‘stuck’, lesson after lesson, year after year, because – I would argue – they have inexorable experience of task-for-no-immediately-discernable-gain which emphasises the frustration that their diagnosis identifies.   Organically grown lessons should enable practice, lesson after lesson, year after year, of meeting the limit of their cognitive and learning ability and then pushing that limit a little further, rather than confirming their limit.   In this way their education would truly be a transformative experience of growth rather than a consignment to limitation. Feedback: after the journey has been made, the product of the lesson is given to the teacher who measures how far the pupil got and puts a level/grade on it.   Every lesson.   Is this onerous?   No, because the breakdown of the lesson by the teacher should be clear and organic enough that the measure of the progress through it will be one of recognition, of mere identification: does it have those facts, does it show the connections between the facts, does it use/test the connections?   The only ‘new ground’ that might be developed in the pupil’s work (and will therefore need more than cursory viewing) will be the higher explorations in evaluation; but these will be new findings, new applications, and the teacher will want to read them in full.   Will the teacher need to give summative and formative analysis for each piece of work?   Once there is a shared assimilation of cognitive development (K > U > E through teaching, K > U > E in learning) between teacher and pupil, borne through lesson-after-lesson, year-after-year of organic experience … no.   Until then, yes, but make it a learning experience: single-word summations, prods, suggestions, questions, directions related directly to the level they have brought their work to and the next step beyond it.   Again, if the cognitive road-map of the lesson has been constructed clearly and organically then the summative and progressive feedback to be given is clear.    

THE APPLE

the Apple by m lewis redford     Teaching and learning can ONLY happen organically - when infused, before, during and after, with an understanding of how a mind builds its cognitive structure.   It's simple: Knowledge >>> Understanding >>> Evaluation (KUE; actually I wonder if 'Exploration' is a better word than 'Evaluation', less preclusive, more open).   You can teach unorganically, reductively, intensively (as in, farming), results-led (value-bled).   It is much easier to measure (and therefore be used as political manure) like this.   But the learning becomes Pavlovian - set stimulae, set responses to get the grade - pupils are given the knowledge, and they learn (= remember) it, or not.   Pupils are also given the Understanding and the Evaluation/Exploration, and they learn/remember that as well, or not.   They are not taught, as such, but are Educationally Behaved.   Organic education is ... the teacher's apple (look at the shape of the diagram).   Preparing: teaching is the unpacking of (already established and recognised) knowledge.   Unpacking happens every lesson, beginning with the identification of the Learning Objective (Learning Horizon) from the curriculum.   Having focussed on the horizon, the map to it is opened-out by the teacher.   The map is the structure/template through which to unpack knowledge – the components of Knowledge, Understanding and Evaluation (KUE) which are the structure and levels of cognitive learning – and this map is the PLANNED lesson.   The way to write the map is to start with the learning objective and ask three sets of questions which deconstruct it into its constituent cognitive components – what are the facts (K), how do they work (U), what are the issues (E)?   The answers to these questions yield the raw ingredients of the lesson.   This level of analysis is conceptual and learned and requires a mastery of the subject in order to achieve it, clearly and efficiently. Tasking: then comes the creativity in the lesson planning.   Working from the raw ingredients you ask: how could the pupil find, identify, collect, collate etc. the facts of the topic (knowledge), how could the pupil connect the facts together to see how the topic functions (understanding), how might the connections be tested to evaluate the functionality of the topic (evaluation)?   What is different about this stage of questioning is that you are thinking of questions that enable pupils to make the discovery themselves – the creativity is in the enabling, thinking of tasks that let them work the cognitive way back to the learning objective from discovery (of facts features - knowledge) through linking (the knowledge - understanding) to playing (with the links - evaluation).   If the tasks do not allow discovery/linking/playing then they have lost reference to what they were trying to achieve (the Way to the learning objective) and they become directionless and pointless – there is activity, but it is not clear why it is being done even though it may have some related or recognisable association with the learning objective.   The key, therefore, to this stage of lesson planning, is to build not any-old tasks that keep them occupied for a lesson, but tasks which ‘window’ the discovery, ‘thread’ the linking and ‘allow’ the play: growth.   If you ask the right questions in the lesson, the learning will grow itself.   Once you have got the questions right, only then do you think about resources and delivery – a mere formality after the main work of questioning has been done. Lesson: then comes the magic of the lesson.   The pupil works as far as s/he can through the lesson (K > U > E) and checks their progress through feedback which is phrased in the same KUE references.   The journey is made naturally if the lesson has been constructed right ( // the questions have been posed organically).   There is no chore here (in the sense of work for a deferred or prospective outcome), there is the momentum of: what-is-it, how-does-it-work, let’s-play-with-it?   The learning should develop through stages of integration: having found things (discovery), you see how those things fit together (how they work, function), then you test how they fit together (practise their use if the subject is a skill, develop their use if the subject is a study).   There should be no sense of having to lead-the-horse-to-water, the only thing holding back the pupil will be h/er current cognitive development.* *There are some pupils with a measured low cognitive ability (i.e. CAT score), or low ability to develop (SEN), who, indeed, are ‘stuck’, lesson after lesson, year after year, because – I would argue – they have inexorable experience of task-for-no-immediately-discernable-gain which emphasises the frustration that their diagnosis identifies.   Organically grown lessons should enable practice, lesson after lesson, year after year, of meeting the limit of their cognitive and learning ability and then pushing that limit a little further, rather than confirming their limit.   In this way their education would truly be a transformative experience of growth rather than a consignment to limitation. Feedback: after the journey has been made, the product of the lesson is given to the teacher who measures how far the pupil got and puts a level/grade on it.   Every lesson.   Is this onerous?   No, because the breakdown of the lesson by the teacher should be clear and organic enough that the measure of the progress through it will be one of recognition, of mere identification: does it have those facts, does it show the connections between the facts, does it use/test the connections?   The only ‘new ground’ that might be developed in the pupil’s work (and will therefore need more than cursory viewing) will be the higher explorations in evaluation; but these will be new findings, new applications, and the teacher will want to read them in full.   Will the teacher need to give summative and formative analysis for each piece of work?   Once there is a shared assimilation of cognitive development (K > U > E through teaching, K > U > E in learning) between teacher and pupil, borne through lesson-after-lesson, year-after-year of organic experience … no.   Until then, yes, but make it a learning experience: single-word summations, prods, suggestions, questions, directions related directly to the level they have brought their work to and the next step beyond it.   Again, if the cognitive road-map of the lesson has been constructed clearly and organically then the summative and progressive feedback to be given is clear.    

Reading. Into Things Too much; a study in impossibly stupid reflection

Reading Into Things Too Much; A Study in Impossibly Stupid Reflections by slightlyignorant Dear Ilana Masad, The members of the fiction admissions committee have carefully review your application, and I am sorry to report that we are unable to offer you a place in [REDACTED].  We have a limited number of openings and must turn away many promising applicants.  This year, one thousand and twenty-six people applied for twenty-five spaces. We wish you well and thank you for your interest in [REDACTED]. Sincerely, [REDACTED] Director [REDACTED DIRECTOR’S INITIALS]/jz It is 5:37am and I am awake and thinking of the nature of time. Because that’s what writers do. Right? Faulkner did it. I must do it too. At first I thought the typo in the first line was the missing “ed” from the word “review,” but then it dawned on me that this may not be the case! What if the typo is the word “have” that comes before “carefully?” Strike that word out, and the whole nature of this thing is thrown into question. A 5:40am kind of question. If the members of the fiction admissions committee carefully review my application, that means they are still reviewing it, ad infinitum, and even though they “are unable to offer” me a place, they might totally change their minds, if, you know, they keep reading my application over, and over, and over... This, at 5:42am, is a hopeful, and far more cheerful, way of looking at this whole situation. Then again, maybe the missing “ed” is supposed to deprive me of what those two letters are shorthand for – think higher ed, continuing ed, that sort of thing. Maybe they’re just rubbing it in. Assholes. Or maybe they’re encouraging me to seek the “ed” in other places. Maybe I should get a PhD. But what’s with the double spacing? Look, REDACTED, I’m an editor myself and I totally notice  when  there  are  two  spaces  between  words, mostly because old people are prone to double-spacing because you used to need to do that on typewriters or something. I think? That’s what someone told me. Maybe it was my mom. The question is, REDACTED, did you actually write these letters on typewriters? I mean, that would be on brand, but then again, maybe it’s actually a message hidden in that double space. Are you going to take me on a treasure hunt? Maybe if I look with a magnifying glass, I’ll find a secret QR code there, betraying the nature of temporality and embedded societal ageism (old people double space, young people QR code). Then if I scan the QR code into my phone, maybe I’ll be directed to a link that says PSYCH! YOU’RE TOTES ACCEPTED! Or maybe, and just maybe, I realize at 5:45am, this is actually a secret Jay-Z marketing campaign. I mean, it makes sense, sort of, in an alternative and paper-killing kind of way. If one thousand and one people are getting this letter (though there’s probably a waiting list, and maybe it’s also twenty-five people long, just in case none of the people who get into REDACTED want to go, in which case it’s nine hundred and eighty-six people getting this particular letter, but I can’t be sure because it’s too early to do math) – well, that’s a lot of shares right there. Every one of us letter-receivers is going to share it with our friends, families, therapists, cats, and neighborhood sympathetic bartenders. Or baristas, baristas are cooler these days. And let’s not forget hairdressers. People talk to their hairdressers, right? Or is that just something from Legally Blond and Orange is the New Black? Anyway, shares. That’s the point. Maybe Jay-Z is going to rebrand himself as jz and is looking to break into highbrow hipster writer culture, you know, the kind that only reads Anna Karenina and e. e. cummings and cries when rats are smushed by buses while smoking American Spirits. Not that that’s me or anything. (It’s actually not. American Spirits are too expensive and taste gross.) But if Jay-Z is rebranding, then hey, it’s his own identity and I totally get that. I respect that. Peace be with you, jz. It’s 5:56am on a Sunday morning, and I have no decided that I’m over you, REDACTED. Because if you really want me to read so much into your letters, you don’t really want me. That’s what they always say about relationships. Don’t be with someone who doesn’t want to be with you. Right? Or maybe you do want me and just want to play Sherlock Holmes games. Well, I’m sorry, REDACTED. I’m not that smart. Or have that ready an access to opium. Or use the word “ejaculated” to express a way of speaking. No, wait, that’s John Watson writing about Holmes. Or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writing as Watson about Holmes. Things are getting meta over here. It’s 6am.

Rousseff's political Crisis

Rousseff’s political crisis is a mix of Cardoso’s and Lula’s

by Mauricio Savarese

There is a lot of 1999 and 2006 in Brazil's current political crisis. Some would call it perfect storm because there is so much involved: a quagmire in Congress, a big corruption scandal, the economy in dire straits, the risk of energy shortage and widespread popular discontent taking middle class to the streets. But we have been there before. The two main differences between now those days lie in President Dilma Rousseff herself; she is not as astute as a political conciliator and her tightly won reelection sparked more hard feelings in the establishment since it was won in a much more aggressive campaign. Still, a lot of the challenges now are similar to those that Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva faced at the Palácio do Planalto years ago.

In March 1999, about 100,000 took to the streets against President Cardoso, who had a vast majority in Congress and very little opposition there. Most of those in the demonstration were union workers led by Lula, no doubt, but that was the biggest demonstration Brazil had seen in a while. Reasons were many: the peg to the dollar disappeared and that made inflation rise steeply, unemployment was getting higher and the risks of energy shortage were visible (later that year there were national blackouts). A corruption scandal linked the Cardoso himself to buying political support so he could make an amend to the Constitution and run for reelection. There were no investigations, despite a lot of evidence, but people still had that on their minds on Paulista Avenue.

In March 2006, President Lula was wondering whether he should run for reelection or not. The kickbacks for votes in Congress scandal, known as mensalão, linked his 2002 campaign directly to bribes -- and that included major picks, including his Vice President José Alencar. His party chairman, a former speaker, his Chief of Staff, his Finance Minister and many key deputies and senators had to resign or keep quiet so he wouldn't be engulfed by the crisis. The general attorney's office was prosecuting many of those cases, and every Friday there was tension everywhere before weekly magazines were out. The incumbent blamed the press and the opposition for creating a divisive atmosphere that was actually fostered by Lula too. The economy wasn't in its best days.

The current crisis shows that Rousseff is a worse politician than both Cardoso and Lula. Period. She doesn't listen even to allies. But it is also a good sample of how much Brazilian institutions have improved. Even those on the streets now don't actually mean it when they carry signs calling her corrupt. She has been long known for not tolerating that and it is one of the reasons why she doesn't get along with many of the folks in Congress. Having a president that is less flexible with scandals is a positive, no matter how unskilled she is in tricking the corrupted into going along with her platform. She did try just that during my stay in Brasilia in 2011 and 2012, but the effort was short-lived enough to assure that few crooks actually lost their big jobs forever.

Another improvement in comparison with those days is that Justice and the general-attorney are doing their job. In 1999, they did nothing. And they had key Congressmen and a governor saying that Cardoso himself offered them bribes, as a couple of media outlets revealed. In 2006 under Lula, these institutions did little, despite paving the way for the first ever convictions of top tier politicians in Brazil's recent history. It could have been much, much more. Now there is a sentiment that no one is being spared, at least by Justice -- off the record, Federal Police are afraid the whole thing might fall apart if investigations don't go deeper with more phone records and bank statements. Still, institutions now work more responsibly and effectively. Better than 1999 and 2006.

Both in 1999 and 2006, there were calls for these presidents to resign or to be impeached. In 2006 they were milder, since there was an election just in a few months, but they existed. Against Cardoso, though, Lula endorsed a move to get him out. Deputy Aecio Neves, who is now a defeated presidential candidate, said that was an attempt for a coup. The theater today is the same after about one million people went to the streets in anti-Rousseff protests. About half of those protesting wanted more effective anti-corruption measures, according to Datafolha polls. But about a quarter preferred to see her out. The media frenzy is surely bigger now, you can read the word impeachment everywhere. But now more people recognize, even in the opposition, that she must complete her term.

So what will happen in a few years? Another perfect storm? It is hard to say. But it will all depend on how Brazil and Rousseff deal with the Petrobras scandal. The economy issues will be dealt with one way or the other, but there must be an end to the presidential coalition system that fostered corruption under Rousseff, Lula, Cardoso and all the others.  If more effective anti-corruption measures come out, all the economy matters will look like déjà vu. One of the reasons why so many people took to the streets is that they see the same characters involved in scandals for ages. One example is the president of the Senate, Renan Calheiros, who was a Justice Minister for Cardoso and a key leader for Lula.

If Rousseff's successor, whoever that is, puts him in a big role in a few years time, be sure that Brazil has failed now.

M

Free speech, and It,s. shrinking limits

Free Speech, and its Shrinking Limits. Thomas Docherty Last Night. by cobrunstrom Last night, I was privileged, excited, frightened and a lot of other things to hear Professor Thomas Docherty give a talk at our gaff.  Thomas Docherty is a cause celebre for academic freedom having been notoriously suspended from work at Warwick University for "inappropriate sighing".  He's also, of course, an eminent scholar who has managed, among many other things, to wrote two books about the accelerating battle to defend and destroy the idea of the university as any kind of cherisher of the creative life of the mind and/or bastion of free speech. His talk last night was called "On Free Speech and Academic Freedom: Responsibilities and Complicities" He was charming, gracious, and light on his feet.  Not tied too closely to any script, he demonstrated an intellectual need to live in the moment and engage real people in a real place. Professor Docherty opened last night by describing how the attack on free speech in universities has become brazen as well as subtle and electronic possibilities of surveillance have eroded the conditions of "privacy" required for free assembly.  He then outlined Stanley Fish's notorious schema of "5 Schools of Academic Freedom", before dissenting quite loudly and inevitably from Fish's narrow preference. Thomas Docherty proposed that that freedom is always about some version of authority, or a relation to authority.  In a useful formulation he asked the question - is it the function of the university of the university to be "Responsible" or "Pro-Active"?  If a university is "responsible" to something external or pre-existing, then freedom is compromised.  If a university if "pro-active" then it has the freedom to express itself in a way that might impact on something larger than itself. Freedom of expression can only be defined as the ability to speak "against" some authority.  Fish's narrow disciplinary definition of academic freedom presupposes that he (and others) already know what the limits of his discipline are.  Yet so-called "literature"  constantly invites extra-literary questions.  The question of what is and is not "academic" also defies any simple categorisation. Reflecting on his own suspension for "sighing" during a meeting, Thomas Docherty recalled Hannah Arendt on "Bureaucracy" which she defines as "rule of nobody" and thus the cruelest form of rulership.  Agency is dissipated to the point where nobody in governance is really responsible for anything while others are accountable for every little thing they do and say. This bureaucratisation of universities is a slow business.  Time was, universities founded their authority on sacred/canonical texts such as the Bible and Aristotle.  With the collapse of theocracy, dialogue became possible, of a kind that is only possible when certain forms of authority can no longer be appealed to to shut down an argument. Thomas Docherty wandered from topic to topic quite a bit, a decision (or lack of decision) that actually seemed to reflect a wish to ventilate his talk, to offer spaces for people to plot their own subsequent interventions. Eisenhower's 'military industrial complex' and Clausewitz and psychological warfare were referenced, before launching into a discussion of "managerialism" and the ideological conviction that anything and everything can be "managed" - a process that culminates in "self-management", where one is encouraged to police one's very thoughts in the name of some orthodox entrepreneurial project. Unsurprisingly, we heard a lot of Orwell.  More imaginatively, we heard much from Othello about "free speech".  The jargon of the neoliberal university was duly interrogated.  "Smooth operation" is managerialese for "univocality".  "Civility" or the demand for "civility" can actually be translated as "obsequious courtship of power".  Every time someone says "I demand free speech BUT...." that "but" is invariably a qualification that destroys the entire basis of any free speech entitlement.  Real free speech is obligated to create doubt and sponsor democratic dialogue. Are their justifiable limits to free speech?  Thomas Docherty proposed "lying" as a test case.  I am not free to "lie" as a form of free speech, because lying destroys the basis of further conversational exchange. Some of the best stuff in the talk involved the concept of privacy.   Social networking of course problematises the very concept of a "private life".  Bentham's panopticon was invoked, illustrating how the subject is atomised without privacy.  Within any form of university discipline or suspension, isolation becomes a key concept - with "no contact with students or colleagues" being a key aspect of the disciplinary procedure. As the speech rolled towards a conclusion, the references accelerated... Erving Goffman (a favourite of mine) was cited in terms of "backstage language" - the need for irregular unpoliced language to build bonds of sociality.  Of course, this opens a big can of worms labelled "Casually Phobic Language".  Aren't we obligated to police our own speech out of respect for others?  When does care and consideration stop being respectful civility and become symptomatic of a larger Foucauldian nightmare? Interestingly, Thomas Docherty remarked on the similarity between displays of hyper-catholicity at processions at the shrine in Knock and the kind of ultra-Marxist jostling he experienced as everyone struggled to reinforce their place on a secure extreme edge of the spectrum.  Lefties, he recalled, have their own version of self-surveillance in the name of orthodoxy. Talking of surveillance, he began his peroration by citing Wolfgang Sofsky's formulation that "the past suffocates the present in a surveillance society".  A society burdened by the recording and replaying of all past exchanges is unable to live in the moment.  Predictably, we heard Milton, quoting Euripides in Areopagitica.  Less predictably, we concluded with Othello and Iago's "I will say nothing" presented as an example of Managerial refusal to offer accounts or explanation.  It is Emilia who represents the voice of heroic expression in the play, the one who is determined to tell the truth no matter what the cost. The talk concluded with plenty of time for questions and discussion, fittingly for a speech that attacked univocality.  Professor Docherty fielded questions and prompted conversations of a wide-ranging nature. We considered the implications of university "branding", with its etymological echoes of searing hot metal burning into flesh (bovine or human) to proclaim irreversible ownership.  There's the paradox that the more a university talks about its "unique and distinct brand" as a selling point in the "global market place" - the more it clamps down on internal distinctiveness and uniqueness.  "Uniqueness" implies "univocality" in branding terms because erasure of difference is central to the kind of instant recognisability that branded identity implies. Indeed "univocality" has been even further enforced by a recent directive recorded at the University of Warwick which has suggested that a distinctive "Warwick tone of voice" should be cultivated by all academics employed there. Thomas Docherty also noted that he now regrets the extent of his earlier investment in critical theory.  It's always seemed to me that the difference between old fashioned canonicity and new fashioned critical theory is that the crusty old tweedies told you what to read but not how to read it whereas the new-fangled critical theorists didn't tell you what to read but how to read it.  The problem is, remarked Professor Docherty, that much of this "how to read" has now been appropriated into a utilitarian and managerial "Skills Agenda". The issue of the academy and academic orthodoxy was brought up.  Many of us were reminded that the few economists who challenged the sustainability of the boom during the noughties were accused of being "wreckers", talking down "brand Ireland".  Dissent can become figured as disloyalty, even vandalism, within and without an academy governed by managerial newspeak. The UK REF exercise was also treated in terms of its role in reinforcing inequality.  The sheer bulk of reading that the reviewers are supposed to do means that publications are not read at all, but merely weighed and measured against prevalent metrics.  To those that hath, more shall be given... etc. etc.  Of course, in the UK, sky high fees mean that universities are already committed to the exclusionary accreditation of young people with inherited wealth and, by implication, to kicking poor people in the head.  Professor Docherty waxed lyrically and terrifyingly on the intergenerational injustice that this implies. We then got into the difficult stuff.  How does "free speech" guarantee multi-orality rather than the oppression of mere verbosity?  Professor Docherty proposed a need for a democracy of "listening", a need to privilege listening and the welcoming of otherness.  Then we got on to Charlie Hebdo.  A number of people asserted the need to unequivocally condemn the murder of journalists and to champion free speech everywhere without having to be "branded" by the "Je Suis Charlie" logo.  It should be important and necessary for people to be able to say "I am not Charlie Hebdo.  I didn't even like him much.  But I'm in favour of people I don't like being able to breath and speak."   Thomas Docherty, who was happy to be described as a "free speech fundamentalist" described his own unhappiness with the defence of free speech becoming branded and therefore appropriated in terms of identification with a particular "cause". Much else was said about the illusion of freedom, freedom which is nothing more than formalised ritualised freedom, which merely parrots and inflates a governing discourse.  Much else was said that was funny and wise.  Wise because funny and funny because wise. But things were curtailed because we all needed to go to the pub.  We needed to go to the pub because we needed to indulge "backstage discourse".  Scurrilous, unbuttoned, uncensored.  Liberatingly private

Induction of Helen Paul theatre And Film Academy first set

on yesterday 25 march, helen paul theatre and film Academy had their induction which took at the school premises.Some of the personality who were present at the induction were the students of Unilag, lagos state university students department of theatre art, crown troupe of Africa, the boss of mega movies, olaasco movie, the director Adefela Segun and many more. the events attracted many people and the street really was shook. the students enjoyed themselves

Retirement

Retirement 2.0 by jameswharris By James Wallace Harris, Sunday, March 22, 2015 Now that I’ve been retired for a year and a half, I see that I need to rethink my retirement plans and habits. Living without the structure of work is changing my psychology. Unlimited free time is like living land of the Lotus Eaters. Doing whatever I want, when I want, is like a habit forming drug. Want to kick back and listen to Van Morrison for two hours – cool. Want to watch the Oklahoma Kid, a western from 1939, sure, why not.  Want to put off lunch until 2:30 to keep reading my science fiction novel, that’s a-okay. I go to bed when I’m tired of doing things, and get up when I’m tired of not doing anything. I’m like a dog that takes a nap whenever and wherever it damn well feels like it. Now this might sound like paradise to my hardworking friends who toil away at their nine to five grind. And it pretty much is. I’m not really complaining, but I sort of am, a kind of worry that I have too much of a good thing. My mom used to always ration cookies to me and my sister, Becky, so when I got my first apartment, I would buy a bag of Chips Ahoy! and eat the whole damn thing. Retirement is overindulging in free time. I need to make Retirement 2.0 more disciplined. Maybe I need to schedule my fun, so I’d feel more productive about doing nothing. The trouble is, I’m writing less, letting the house go, ignoring things on my to-do list, and losing all sense of discipline. I don’t know if this is because I’ve gone eighteen months without working, or because I gave up junk food January 1st, and don’t have enough brain fuel to keep me energized. However, I don’t want to get a job just to force a routine on myself. I started writing this essay last week. I wrote the title, thought about it, and then went and fixed myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and went back to reading The Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. Writing takes work. Writing takes sticking to the project for hours. And since I’ve been retired, I realize that it’s much too easy to skip working at things. I’ve talk with some of my other retired friends, and they also talk about losing their discipline. We can’t decide if it’s a matter of just getting old, or not having a routine forced on us. Evidently, what they told us in school was true, work builds character. At work, if I got assigned a big project, knowing it was due in two months, and I’d project manage myself and get it done. Now if I want to do something, it’s whenever I feel like doing it, and that tends to promote a lackadaisical mindset. If I have to do things by a date, like a doctor’s visit, or help a friend move a tree, I get it done on time. Which makes me think I should assign myself tasks and deadlines, even if it’s fun, like promising to go a movie with a friend next Sunday afternoon. Now I’m sure BillyPilgrim is going to suggest I’m depressed, but I’m not. I’m writing this essay to think about the nature of my situation, and figure out solutions. I should plan each blog post as a specific job with a deadline, and divide up the work like a project manager. I’m fascinated that we all go through various phases in our life. My friend Connell, who retired ahead of me, warned me about this phase. I didn’t understand. I wonder how many more phases I will experience before I die? Could older people warn me about future life phases of retirement years? Would I comprehend what they tell me. Could I use the knowledge to my advantage? I don’t know, but I’m going to research into this. [p.s. I scheduled writing this essay in my Outlook Tasks, and I’m finishing on time. And I’ve just scheduled a much bigger writing project that’s due March 31st.] JWH

TIPS FOR PARENTING

17 tips for parenting with omnipresent mobile devices, YouTube and apps by Alex How should we integrate smartphones into the lives of our children? Some ideas: http://t.co/GRlUzUgFtq pic.twitter.com/N0afbFRr7O — Alex Howard (@digiphile) March 7, 2015 Before I dove into the sometimes controversial waters of technology and development, I talked to a lot of people about parenting and screen time, including some experts. I wrote about what I learned in a column about the parenting challenges that ubiquitous screens pose in the 21st century. Following is a quick list of insights to scan & share, with a big lift from danah boyd at the end. 1) Screens are ubiquitous in modern life. How we integrate them into our own lives will influence our children. 2) Engagement with our children as we consume media, whether on TV, tablets, or print, is critical to their learning. 3) “Parents can’t go wrong if they engage in “dialogic learning.” As you read or watch screens, talk about the stories. 4) There’s an important difference between children passively consuming media on a screen andusing it to be social. Watching a video isn’t the same as Facetiming with grandparents. 5) Parents should consider if screen time consuming media may be replacing human-to-human interaction. Nominated for most (unintentionally) ironic ad of the year. http://t.co/veiuF7KiB9 pic.twitter.com/KLlswOOg4y — Alex Howard (@digiphile) October 22, 2014 6) Kids generally learn better with materials they can touch, vs what they see on a screen. 3D > 2D. 7) Not all screen time is detrimental. It should be age appropriate, time-limited, & involve parents. Smartphones & @YouTube for Kids expand our learning options. How should we integrate them? http://t.co/GRlUzUgFtq pic.twitter.com/318d7lC7f2 — Alex Howard (@digiphile) March 6, 2015 8) Children learning through play are negatively impacted by screens playing in the background. 9) Watching TV or videos 2 hours before bedtime can have negative impacts on children’s sleep. If you're a parent, do you have "screen sense?" http://t.co/GRlUzUgFtq [Image Credit: @ZeroToThree] pic.twitter.com/rUUxi4vc7I — Alex Howard (@digiphile) March 5, 2015 10) Common sense: use of mobile devices by parents, ignoring children, can lead to them acting out. 11) Too much interactivity in ebooks and games can actually distract from story lines and learning. 12) From danah boyd: “Parents: check your own screen engagement when you’re with your kid. We set the norms. 13) “When you’ve got younger kids, talk through every interaction you have with a screen” — danah boyd 14) “When your kids are older, talk them through how they want to allocate their time in general” — danah boyd 15) “It’s not about ‘screen vs. non-screen’ because homework is now screen. It’s about thinking about what time should look like.” — danah boyd 16) “What makes screen time ‘educational’ is…how the tech or media is integrated into life more generally”- — danah boyd 17) “Forgive yourself for using tech as a babysitter sometimes.”— danah boyd. Have empathy for other parents, too, especially on plane rides or long bus rides. Fellow parents, your comments and thoughts on screen time, kids and learning are welcome.

In the long run

The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring, Tra La! by Nigel Smith I can remember rehearsing for the Mikado (I think I was in the chorus, but am not too sure), when I was about eleven. And that song has been with me ever since. Anyhow, this year really does make me want to sing out Tra La! The snowdrops have only just finished flowering after an amazingly long run of almost two months. The first ones were emerging in the second week of January – which is why I still think they are the best value flowers in the garden. But from now on, the pace begins to quicken. Last Wednesday was fabulous. I’d just fed the sheep and was about to head indoors and catch up with emails etc., when my eye was caught by a glint of white on a shrub down by the pond. It was the sun shining off the newly emerged catkins of a wonderful pussy willow we acquired about five years ago, and which has now come into its own. I cut it hard back every year, which encourages new growth and a fresh display of catkins. The willow in question also has wonderful bluish decorative bark, which looks like somebody has dipped it in fine flour: Pussy willow, Salix acutifolia ‘Blue Streak’. Next to the white pussy willow, but actually planted about fifteen years previously, are two shrubs of the black pussy willow. In my experience this willow is far less vigorous and doesn’t benefit from regular pollarding. So I leave it alone. Maybe that’s why it isn’t always wonderful, but this year I’m delighted to report that it has been superb: Black pussy willow, Salix gracilistyla ‘Melanostachys’. I then took myself and my camera into the wood where the wild primroses were still in flower. They began shortly after the snowdrops and were rather disappointing in January, but little did I realise they were saving themselves for a magnificent display in early March. I’ve never known anything like it. They’re all over the wood, hundreds of clumps, and they light it up. I didn’t know you could, but I can also smell them on the air. And a few picked flowers in a tiny glass of water on the kitchen table last for about five days. The common British woodland primrose, Primula vulgaris. The largest clumps of primroses are in a part of the wood dominated by ash trees, all of which (and we planted about 400 in 1993) are now threatened with imminent death, thanks to Ash die-back disease. So I’ve been turning my attention to the part of the wood where oak trees reign supreme. This is where I was planting those snowdrops I mentioned in a recent post. On my way there, I passed by a clump of Siberian Squills which I am encouraging to naturalise. They seed quite freely and I was careful to buy a couple of pots of plants which were still in flower. Some cultivars can be a bit wishy-washy, with blues that tend more towards Cambridge (light blue) than Oxford. In the matter of squills, but only of squills, I am a firm supporter of the dark Oxford blue. Anyhow, after the recent hard winters they seem to have seeded freely and are forming nice patches below some hazel bushes. The Siberian Squill, Scilla siberica. Once in the oak wood proper, I headed past my new patches of snowdrops and remembered briefly how my back had ached after four days of intensive bulb planting. I was heading for a plant we had only discovered three or four years ago. Our garden soil is heavy silty clay and it’s also very wet. These are ideal conditions for growing the popular Summer Snowflake, or Leucojum aestivum (the variety we favour is ‘Gravetye Giant’) and it flowers freely with us, although more in later spring than summer, proper. But the Giant has a more diminutive, and dare I say it, more subtle, cousin, the Winter Snowflake, or Leucojum vernum. As I said, we discovered the plant a few years ago and I can now report it loves our soil, too. It was quite expensive so we bought just six bulbs, which I managed to sub-divide into a dozen and these are now forming small, but free-flowering clumps, which I’ll be able to divide next year. But it’s the flowers. They’re as subtle as snowdrops and twice the size, They are also gorgeous when seen from below. I love their dainty hat- or bell-like shape and they are just large enough to bob about in the wind – which was what they were doing on Wednesday. The sun shone. Birds twittered and my naughty black puppy Pen was behaving herself. A perfect day. Ah, the flowers that bloom in the spring: Tra-La!

ON st patrick's day

Running to Rio on St Patrick’s Day by cobrunstrom I am grateful that I live in a country with an easy flag to draw.   I feel this particularly on Six Nations Rugby days, when I see the most dedicated of Welsh fans trying to draw a dragon on their own face.  (Mind you, Welsh fans should be absolved of face painting obligations because they can sing better than anyone else.) Then I wonder what it's like growing up in Brazil.  Do children have to learn how to put all of those stars in exactly the right place?   How proximate does the star placing on a flag have to be for a six year old in Sao Paulo to be considered a patriot? Today is easy by comparison.  I'm to help steward about a hundred children through the town.  They are wearing running gear and passing improvised Olympic torches back and forth.   The theme of the overall parade is "Carnival", which seems to me to be a dangerous taunting of the weather gods.  Accordingly, we will be publicising our charity fun run with a Hiberno-Brazilian joke.  We will dance downhill from the Railway Bridge blowing whistles and running on the spot.  As we arrive in the town square and confront a podium full of Worthies, the children will sing the following to the theme tune from "Chariots of Fire": We’re running to Rio We’re starting today ’Cos running in Rio’s Just one year away. We’re running to Rio To run and to play If we want to get there, We really can’t stay We’re going to run and jump and swim The ocean so blue! We’re not sure that running – all that far’s A good thing to do! We’re going to run and jump and swim The ocean so blue! We’re not sure that running – all that far’s A good thing to do! We’re running to Rio, It’s too far away. We can’t run to Rio. Is Leixlip OK? Yes, Leixlip’s OK It’s only 5K. For the last verse, a giant sign - which has been pointing out "9,168 km to Rio" is reversed to read "5 km to Leixlip".  I blow a whistle.  Everyone laughs.  The Worthies nod graciously.  We jog off in the general direction of Leixlip (but actually stop just round the corner) for juiceboxes and crisps. Some people would wait till tomorrow to post this description.  But in my mind's eye.  Right now.  Everything is perfect - everything is going off without a hitch.  In fact, in my version, my unrealised early morning version, the sun is actually shining throughout.  So I think I'll keep this St Patrick's Day parade the way it is.

A great woman

You are a great woman, Jen Colby by susutah As a result of the Sustainability Resource Center moving to Academic Affairs and emphasizing activities such as data gathering/analysis, social marketing, and communication, the position of “sustainability coordinator” was eliminated. The Sustainability Resource Center is indebted to Jen Colby, former sustainability coordinator, for her years of service, her willingness to teach, and her devotion to students. She will be missed. By Erika Longino, Sustainability Resource Center Jen Colby, former sustainability coordinator, cuts vegetables grown in the Edible Campus Gardens in the Union kitchen. I remember starting out as a volunteer at the Edible Campus Gardens. Being a Pacific Northwest-raised grower, my desert gardening toolbox was sparse to say the least. Jen Colby, former sustainability coordinator for the Sustainability Resource Center, is the one who taught me the tricks and tips to gardening in the arid southwest. She also taught me a great deal more. Whether it was how to improve saline-alkaline soils, identify desert native plants, get crops enough water, or deal with bindweed, Jen was incredibly knowledgeable and willing to share. Furthermore, her warmth and ability to navigate the University system were imperative to the functioning of the gardens at the U. With deep appreciation and gratitude, we acknowledge Jen’s amazing presence here at the Sustainability Resource Center and in the gardens, and likewise acknowledge how much she’ll be missed. If Jen has taught us anything, it is to carry on through adversity and be flexible with sticky situations. When University construction cuts through the garden space, we plan a hoop house and a raspberry bed to implement when it is complete (coming spring/summer 2015!). When our storage basement floods, we inventory the damage and negotiate the purchase of a new set of tools. When it looks like rain, we plant spring seeds and make the best use of Utah’s precious rainfall. Rhubarb starting to show its ruby stalks in the spring sunlight. The hope of the stewards of the Edible Campus Gardens is to carry on Jen’s tradition of sharing and educating future edible landscapers. Your hands, head, and heart are always welcome in the campus gardens. Volunteer for a fresh perspective and some fresh produce! For more information about volunteering, e-mail the Edible Campus Gardens at uofucampusgardens@gmail.com or sign up for our weekly updates. Erika Longino is a garden steward with the Sustainability Resource Center’s Edible Campus Gardens.

the long run

The Partial Solar Eclipse 2015: a newt’s eye view. by Nigel Smith I must admit, the media mega-hype leading up to the event did not put me in a particularly receptive frame of mind. The Breakfast Show on BBC1 was particularly inane. They seemed to think we all had a mental age of two-and-a-half:  ‘Be sure to wear these safety glasses and never look at the sun without protection. Remember, dark glasses aren’t enough.’  That’s fine every hour or so, when new viewers turn on, but not, please, every five minutes… And then the explanations were ludicrous. At one point I even heard a presenter explaining that the moon was smaller than the sun. REALLY? Are you certain? Surely, my photos clearly showed it to be the other way around. Otherwise, why would the moon over-shadow the sun….? Grrrrr…. Time to tear your hair out in handfuls. And then there was that idiotic footage from Salisbury Plain, or the Western Isles, with Stonehenge or the Callanish stone circle in the background. I couldn’t believe the inconsequential rubbish the various spokespeople spouted. Did they honestly think that Neolithic communities erected those stunning monuments because ‘eclipses were important to them?’ Christ, if I wasn’t an atheist, I’d call down Hell’s fires to consume these so-called ‘experts’ and subject them to everlasting torment. But I digress. [Takes deep breath. Thinks calming-thoughts-verging-on-Mindfulness. Then resumes:] So I was in no mood to get exercised about a mere eclipse. At nine o’clock I headed out to the barn to check the sheep and let the chickens out. But as soon as I stepped out of the back door I was aware that the light was different. Normally our mornings are noisy affairs with birdsong everywhere. But not then. I barely heard so much as a tweet. It was eerily silent. And the light was subdued too, with a very slight reddish tinge. No, it could not be denied, everything somehow seemed very special. I fed and let the chickens out of their fox-proof hutch; then I went in and collected various cameras. I also shouted to Maisie, who was up-stairs catching-up with her emails, and together we headed down to the pond. Over twenty years ago she had seen a solar eclipse beautifully reflected in the waters of the Flag Fen Mere, so we decided to repeat the experiment and use our pond as a mirror this time, too. As we walked down to the pond we could see there was a thin covering of cloud which was thick enough to allow me to take a few few shots directly, with my ISO set around 1250 and the thickest filter I could find. They were OK, but not brilliant. Then the clouds started to clear and we turned our attention to the pond. The trouble was that the warmth of the sun made the newts frisky and soon it became impossible to see anything. But as the eclipse progressed, the temperature around us dropped and it grew darker. The newts were fooled into thinking it was night – and time for bed. Suddenly the activity stopped and the waters became icily calm. And then I got this view. It may not be National Geographic and there’s no Corona, but it was worth the wait. And I’ll never, ever forget it.

CITY ON FIRE

City On Fire by problemmachine There are certain common threads that run through stories about violence. Violence has consequences – this is almost the very definition of violence. When you forcibly enact your will upon the world, things change, and often not in the ways you expected or desired. That permanence of violence, a permanence which outlasts any intent and causes unforeseen consequences to echo after its passage, is its most distinguishing characteristic – which is probably why, despite studies suggesting that the most harmful influence on young children comes from justified violence with minimal consequences, that that kind of milquetoast 'good-guy' violence is still the most commonly portrayed in media for youth. It may be a lie, and a dangerous one, but it feels safer because it is insulated from the honesty of violence, is violence with all of the blood and tears drained out. We need our bad guys and our good guys, and we need the good guys to stop the bad guys, and maybe it's a failure of creativity but the solution is always to fight some kind of just war where no one is hurt. There aren't really any just wars, just wars; and there are definitely no wars where no one gets hurt. This same kind of lie is popular in games, and has been all along, but has become more and more noticeable since the advent of recorded voice lines. We want to create enemies just human enough to be hated, but not so human that you feel bad for murdering them. For most of last week I was awash in fictional blood. I played through Hotline Miami 2, and about halfway through that experience I went to see a stage production of Sweeney Todd, and something clicked there, a connection between disparate works snapped into place, the blood and the music pulsing under it, describing an arc of savage and hungry beauty. There's meaning to the narrative, there's ideas crawling on the surface, but there's also the bloodlust itself, the Grand Guignol, the pure aesthetic of violence and shrieking sound. So: Consequences. Revenge against those who have wronged us and then revenge against us for wronging those who have wronged us, echoing back and forth until it fades away, its memetic virus killing hosts faster than it can spread, or reaches an awful crescendo, a nuclear chain reaction, and destroys everything. Sweeney and Turpin destroying each other and everyone around them, the mob boss mowing down swathes of rivals in aimless vengeance, consequence outlasting intent by the echo chamber of revenge. Imitation as well, innocence becoming violence by learning it as the shape of power and respectability, the fans kill because Jacket killed, Toby kills because Sweeney killed – in this way, as well, violence reproduces and outlives intent. This is the story we tell when we talk about violence. The world twists off its axis, doomsday lurks around every corner, final judgment deferred moment by moment until its deferment run out, and those who live by the sword die by the sword, and when everyone starts living by the sword that is how everyone dies. Maybe this isn't a more honest perspective on violence than others – that which holds it to be hard and sad but necessary work, or to be naturally repugnant in every way but a behavior reinforced by the twisted incentives of a dying society – but it's a perspective that at least looks at violence directly, as a force unto itself, rather than using humans as target practice and plot device without ever looking back at the trail of blood left behind. problemmachin

After encountering many angry eggs, U.S. Ambassador to Libya quits Twitter by Alex Today, Ambassador Safira Deborah tweeted that she would stop using Twitter herself because doing so was distracting from the twin goals of "peace and stability" that the United States of America had in Libya. It was unclear whether it was her communication choices that led to the decision, the reception she encountered on the platform or some combination of the two factors. Twiplomacy created a timeline of her tweets. The ambassador tweeted out a 8-part statement today, working within Twitter's character limitations. She offered context for her initial decision to use the real-time social media platform, stating that it the "only way to reach out" for public diplomacy, in the context of Libya's security situation and that her goal was to "encourage a transparent dialogue with all Libyans." @SafiraDeborah: "Dear Tweeps -and not so dear Tweeps- when I opened a Twitter account last year it was to encourage a transparent dialogue with all Libyans," she tweeted. "Given the security situation in #Libya, Twitter was the only way to reach out and I am pleased to have developed a following of over 49k ." [Mon, Mar 23 2015 17:54:09] What she found on Twitter lately appears to have led her to conclude that such a dialogue was not possible: "Unfortunately, it seems there are some more focused on parsing and distorting "tweets" than reading actual statements of US policy," she tweeted. "I have from time to time gone on strike against Twitter militias and those who resort to vulgar personal attacks in lieu of arguments. I have concluded it is best to cease efforts to communicate via Twitter insofar as it distracts from our goal of peace & stability 4 #Libya." [Mon, Mar 23 2015 18:05:40] The ambassador clarified that, while she would go silent, the United States delegation to Libya would continue to use Twitter on the embassy's official account,@USAEmbassyLibya. "We shall continue to post official statements on our embassy FB account. To all those responsible & thoughtful Tweeps out there, thank you. She then offered thanks and tweeted the Arabic phrase for "goodbye." "Getting to know thoughtful, dedicated Libyans via Twitter has been an inspiration & given me great hope 4 Libya's future. I wish you well. Masalaamah." There was some context for her apparent decision, from a few hours before the statement: the ambassador tweeted about violence in Tarhouna, a town to the southeast of Tripoli, and experienced a wave of angry tweets in response. "Terrible news today from #Tarhouna where 8 innocent displaced #Tawergha killed in air strikes. This violence serves no one's interests. My last tweet based on sources on both sides. Numbers may need correction but bottom line remains: violence serves no one. Fascinating reactions when I didn't assign blame just decried the ongoing violence. Says so much about #Libya and why peace so difficult. Condemning violence also means condemning the reported killing of Colonel Hibshi's family members and innocents who support Dignity. This info followed info on the other strikes: both are wrong and we condemn both. The violence must cease. Period. The unacceptable violence in #Tarhouna against innocents-whether Col Hebshi's family or others-underscores the need for Leon to succeed. P.S. Sadly I have begun to block those who use vulgarity or call for harm to me or my family. Disagree with me but do so with dignity." If you search Twitter for her username, the response to her decision to leave a field of engagement in what might fairly be described as an information war was heated. In the wake of this choice, it will be interesting to see whether the State Department offers any additional guidance for its ambassadors using social media to directly engage the people in the countries their mission is in. Will angry, abusive tweets that harass or threaten ambassadors prove sufficient to poison the well for public diplomacy in less than 140 characters?

I Found An Old Letter A Famous Author Wrote To Me by dysfunctional literacy If I'd received a letter from the famous author who wrote THIS book, I'd have had the letter framed! I was a bit suspicious of these stories the first time I heard about them.  First, a woman last summer found an old letter written by JRR Tolkien where the famous author described how much teaching depressed him.  Then a few weeks ago, some guy found an old letter that Roald Dahl had written him decades ago, giving him some advice about describing a woman’s features. As I mentioned, I thought these stories were suspicious.  If I had ever received a letter from a famous author, especially authors of The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I would have kept track of those letters.  I would’ve had them framed.  I would have shown them off to every visitor who stepped into my house/apartment.  How do you lose a letter written to you by JRR Tolkien or Roald Dahl? After I thought about it, though, I remembered that these kind of things usually happen in threes.  I figured if anybody should be the third person who finds a letter from a famous author, it ought to be me (or I).  Maybe, just maybe, I had an old letter that I had forgotten about from a famous author.  I went through my boxes of old stuff, including letters, musty books, and outdated bills.  I found a birthday check that my grandma had given me 25 years ago (I didn’t cash it back then because she really didn’t have the money to write me checks, but grandmas do stuff like that).  After hours of digging and reminiscing, I found something that I had forgotten existed. About 20 years ago, James Patterson wrote Along Came a Spider, and it was actually a pretty good book.  At the time, I was trying to write my own serial killer mystery where a fake psychic had to figure out who the murderer was to save his own reputation.  No, the protagonist wasn’t really psychic (I wasn’t going to cop-out on my one mystery novel), and I wrote James Patterson for some advice.  My older brother had given me some ideas that I was using in my book, so I was thinking about giving my brother co-author credit. The problem was that there was a scene involving intimacy (I guess it’s okay to call it a sex scene now), and my brother wanted me to use the phrase “twin cones of pleasure.”  I was trying to write a high-brow mystery, and there was no way I was going to use that phrase.  I told my brother that I might use that euphemism in another book, but I wasn’t going to use it in my high-brow mystery.  My brother called me a hack, which is funny because I’d never published anything and I had a job that had nothing to do with writing.  But the argument upset me so much that I never wrote the sex scene. At any rate, when I wrote my fan letter to James Patterson, I asked him if “twin cones of pleasure” was any good and I wanted to know if it was wise for a writer to work with somebody else on a novel.  I didn’t keep a copy of my letter.  Back then, people didn’t keep their own letters.  Instead, we just kept the letters we received (and in some cases found them decades later).  I was surprised when I read his response for the first time in (probably) 20 years: Dear Jimmy, Thank you for your letter.  Without fans like you, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do. I don’t think it’s a good idea to work with other writers on a novel.  It could cause legal issues, and some authors might try to take too much credit for books they didn’t really spend much time with. Also, whatever you do, don’t use the phrase “twin cones of pleasure.”  It’s tacky, and tacky sex scenes can ruin an otherwise good novel. Good luck with your writing career. Sincerely, James Patterson After I found the letter, I remembered why I had forgotten it.  It had taken James Patterson a long time to write back to me.  That’s not a complaint; I’m impressed that he wrote back at all.  By the time I received it, though, I had already given up on the novel, and my older brother no longer cared about the phrase “twin cones of pleasure.”  There was no use showing my brother the letter and opening an old wound.  I’m not the type of person who will bring up an old dispute just to prove that I’d been right a long time ago. Even so, I can’t believe I didn’t take better care of that letter.  I should have had it framed.  I appreciate a celebrity author who takes time to write a personal letter to a fan.  I mean, yeah, James Patterson wasn’t writing 20 books a year back then, but still, he took time that he didn’t have to take, and that means a lot to me.  And I shouldn’t have been so critical of those other guys who lost their letters from famous writers. In the meantime, I’ve written JK Rowling, asking her if she would pretend to be me like she did with Robert Galbraith.  Robert Galbraith’s Corcoran Strike book sales weren’t all that high until JK Rowling said she was him (or he).  If she could pretend to be him (or he), then maybe she would consider pretending to be me (or I).  It doesn’t hurt to ask.  I’d love for my book sales to go up. So if my ebook sales suddenly skyrocket, and JK Rowling pretends to be disappointed that her lawyers can’t keep secrets, then you’ll know what really happened.  I’m not holding my breath, though.  E-mail can move very slowly nowadays. ***** DISCLAIMER! Despite how far-fetched everything sounds, the above story is true, except for the part about me writing a letter to James Patterson and receiving a response. ***** What do you think?  Have you ever received a letter from a famous author (or any celebrity)?  If you did, did you forget where you put it?  What famous author would you like to get a letter from?  What advice would you ask for from a famous author?  Would you ever use the phrase "twin cones of pleasure" in a sex scene, and if you do, would you please let me know so I could tell my

MY GPS CATS

My GPS Cats by conchapman      Using tiny satellite tracking harnesses, the Cat Tracker Project has enrolled more than 500 cats in a program that will outfit them with Global Positioning System devices.   The Boston Globe   "Is Okie lost--again?" I was pretty excited to be chosen to test drive CatTrack, the state-of-the-art global positioning system for cats.  It would mean an end--finally!--to stupid arguments with my housemate Okie, who is to feline intelligence what the Marianas Trench is to the Pacific Ocean; the lowest depth, the nadir, the perigee, the bottom of the bottom. "I am not dumb.  Just--directionally challenged." A few summers back Okie was gone from Memorial Day until late in August, and not because he has a summer house on the Cape.  He was hopelessly lost, not "cheating" on our owners the way some cats do in order to get a second crack at the Purina Cat Chow every day.  No, Okie returned several pounds lighter and even more confused than he was when he left, if that's possible, the result of wandering dazed in the woods behind our house during the hottest months of the year.  When the Nobel Prize Committee calls, he knows it ain't for him. But with GPS to guide us on our way, I'm hoping that my days of chasing after the Oak-man, trying to herd him home like a sheepdog, are over.  God knows it's only going to get worse; he 63 in cat years, and the grey matter he's lost over the years in late-night fights with fisher cats--among other local predators--ain't coming back. Fisher cat--not a household pet. While I'm thinking these thoughts I watch Okie amble up, all innocent barefoot cat with cheeks of grey.  He doesn't know what he doesn't know, poor sap, so I've had to serve as his tour guide over hill and dale lo these seven years we've been living together. "How they hangin' Oak?" I call out. "Nothin' much," he replies.  He has a stock assortment of come-backs, which don't always fit the greeting. "You want to go chase chipmunks?" I ask. "Sure," he says.  "Although--" "Yes?" "I don't want to get lost again." "I know buddy," I say.  "But not to worry, I've got GPS." His face clouds over.  "I am so sorry to hear that.  Is there anything you can do for it?" "It's not a disease you nutball, it stands for 'global positioning system.'" "Oh," he says, and I can tell he's not quite comprehending.  "Do we even have a globe anymore?  I mean, the kids moved out, and I thought mom gave a lot of that stuff away." "Not a globe, the globe--the one you're standing on!" He looked down at his feet, to make sure he wasn't missing anything.  "Yep--it's right here," he said. "It had better be--I don't know where else we'd put it," I said, shaking my head.  "C'mon, I'll show you how it works.  You punch it what you're looking for . . ." "Chipmunks!" "And we see what comes up." A voice with a vaguely British accent came on--I guess the units were originally made for Range Rovers--and began to speak: "Proceed twenty steps to the stone fence, then turn RIGHT to enter the motorway." "Do we have a motorway?" Okie asked, clueless as usual. "I think the nice English lady in the little box means our driveway." We low-tailed it down to the asphalt circle that connected our front walk to the street, then began to poke our noses into one of those "dry" New England stone fences Puritan women devised to keep their men's minds off of sex--and try saying that five times fast. "Well look what we have here," I said with a note of feigned Kumbaya pacifism in my voice. "What?" "It's Chip and Dale!" "REALLY?" Okie asked.  "I love those guys!" "No, you dubo, figuratively."  Unlike me, the Oakmeister does not peruse the many tomes on aesthetic philosophy that the elder male human in the house keeps as vestiges of his undergraduate days.  "I'm not wasting my time chasing cartoon characters." We crept along, cat-like--actually, it wasn't just cat-like, we were genuine flesh-and-blood cats--until we were positioned just outside a likely chipmunk cave. "Now would you please proceed in a stealthy fashion?" I asked, and plaintively I might add. "You want stealth, huh?" "Right--and silence." "Okay," he said.  Duh. We each took a position on the opposite sides of the crack through which we expected, any minute, a chipmunk to pop its head.  I held my breath--I made Oakie hold his own.  After what seemed like an hour, we saw a furry little head peak out to see if the coast was clear.  I gave Oak a glance and for once, he seemed to "get it"--the whole predator/prey thing--right away.  I silently mouthed "One . . . two . . . three"--when the silence was broken by . . . "Arriving at--destination.  Chipmunk hollow on RIGHT." The damn GPS!  The chipmunk scurried back into the hole as if he'd been sucked by a vacuum cleaner. "Damn it to hell!" I squealed. "Better watch it--mom will hear you." "What's she going to do--send me to Blessing of the Animals Day?"Ii

The beauty of Transportation

The decline and fall of the rail blue empire (British Railways’ corporate identity 1964-1986, part 2) by dwtransportwriting British Rail’s rail blue corporate identity was one of the most successful applied to any British transport company in the 20th Century, but by the late 1980s it had been all but wiped out. The story of its decline and fall is directly and inversely related to the rising confidence of British Rail and its operating sectors themselves. Its success, in essence, became its undoing. If asked to recall British Rail as a nationalised operator, most British people will eventually describe blue and grey trains, and the double arrow logo, all part of the rail-blue corporate identity developed by Design Research Unit in the mid-1960s, as we saw last week. So strongly did that corporate identity imprint into the national consciousness that it has over-written the earlier corporate identities used by British Railways (which we looked at here), and remains more memorable than many of the later British Rail corporate identities for its subsidiary business sectors, and many of the post-privatisation corporate identities developed for train operators. Perhaps the zenith of British Rail’s corporate identity was on its fleet of High Speed Trains, introduced from 1976. With their wedge-shaped ends, the InterCity 125s were the product British Rail’s corporate identity could have been made for. They remain one of just a handful of transport vehicles which have become icons in their own right, recognisable outside the transport cognoscenti. The sharp angles of the double arrow logo perfectly complemented the raked ends of the InterCity 125, and the look was enhanced by extending the safety-yellow front end back along the bodyside in a stripe which ended at an angle matching the nosecone of the train. By putting it on the path to profitability, this was the train that saved British Rail’s InterCity business, and probably, by extension, British Rail itself. Beeching might have wanted British Rail to look modern with its new corporate image, but it took until the InterCity 125 before it had a truly modern train to match. An InterCity 125 at Old Royston in 1982. Photo by John Rinder [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons It transformed British Rail’s image almost instantly. Suddenly, instead of a distress purchase, intercity train travel was an attractive alternative to driving a car. Thanks to their modern image, and a top speed of some 15-25mph faster than previous express trains, allowing journey times to be slashed, the InterCity 125s created substantial passenger growth. This was a virtually unheard-of concept on British Rail at the time, with large main line electrification schemes the only other projects which had delivered sizeable boosts in patronage. The joy of the Intercity 125 for British Rail was that it was diesel powered, so it could be widely deployed. This was very useful given that electrification was proceeding at a snail's pace, if indeed even that fast. Before long the InterCity 125s were operating from London to Wales, the west country, the north east and the Pennines. Much of the rest of British Rail's network might still have been slow, draughty and generally uncomfortable, not to mention clearly lacking in investment (as anyone who caught an old, rattling, diesel train at a slowly decaying station in the so-called ‘Provincial’ service areas could tell you) but the InterCity 125s defined British Rail’s public image and for the first time gave it real confidence going forward. British Railways’ 1950s and 1960s lions and wheel heraldic emblems, regional variations, and steam train-inspired carriage colours exemplified its muddled thinking and failure to get to grips with the post-war world. By the late 1970s, British Rail’s double-arrow-blue-and-grey corporate identity summed it up, too. This was a cohesive company with a good degree of confidence about what it was doing, certainly in its InterCity business. The corporate identity was unfussy, almost stark, and that was British Rail too. It would get you to where you were going, most of the time anyway. But it wasn’t exactly seductive or luxurious. The preponderance of dark blue on the outside of trains, melamine fittings inside, and the acres of dark-coloured polyester uniforms sported by staff, saw to that. That, however, was almost the point. British Rail was still living down the financial fiasco of the Modernisation Plan, and was trying to present a sober, financially responsible image, at which it was beginning to succeed. The catering was dire (I know it became a standing joke, but unless you were in the restaurant car of an InterCity train it was, it truly was), customer service was rarely better than poor-to-average, and there was never enough capacity on busy commuter routes because the government hated giving British Rail any money in case it wasted it (hence also the slow progress on electrification), but British Rail and its corporate identity were rapidly gaining in confidence. In 1978 the first major revision to the corporate image was unveiled, when locomotives began receiving the “large logo” version of the British Rail livery. This featured a full height version of the double arrow logo. Suddenly, British Rail had become proud enough of itself that it wanted to emblazon the logo which represented the company as large as it possibly could. A Class 50 locomotive painted in British Rail's "large logo" version of its corporate livery. This photo was take in 1990, by which time the locomotive has begun to look quite scruffy. Photo by Daniel Wright [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0] via this flickr page Yet this was the rail blue corporate identity’s last hurrah. In the same year, InterCity’s prototype Advanced Passenger Trains (APTs) entered service. Thanks to InterCity’s success with the InterCity 125 (even though the design teams of the two trains were rivals) it was in a strong enough position to demand that the Advanced Passenger Trains break away from the long-established rail blue corporate identity and sport a brand new livery of dark and light grey, separated by red and white stripes. It was a complete departure from rail blue and grey, although (for now) the double arrow logo was retained in the design. The new livery worn by the APT, here shown on its power cars. Image by Emoscopes (Self made using Corel Photo-Paint 6.0) [CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons There had actually been variations to the standard British Rail corporate image from the beginning. Pullman coaches wore a reversed version of the blue and grey colours (grey bodies, blue around the windows), a smart colour scheme also employed later on the prototype High Speed Train and the experimental APT (not to be confused with the later prototype APTs referred to above). From the mid-1970s, refurbished diesel trains on provincial services had been painted white with a rail blue stripe. A refurbished Class 101 diesel train in 1978 at Edinburgh Haymarket. It's in remarkably clean condition. This colour scheme was more usually seen looking rather greyer... Photo by Steve Jones [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0] via this flickr page In fact this was a particularly stupid colour scheme given that diesel trains make themselves dirty through exhaust fumes, and British Rail’s cleaning regime was diffident at best, especially for provincial trains. Nevertheless, there was still a strong link to the rail blue corporate identity in all these variations. The new InterCity corporate identity was a much more radical break from the standard corporate image. Ironically, British Rail’s corporate identity had been championed by its 1961-1965 chairman Dr Richard Beeching to give the company a modern image to coalesce around, to encourage it to behave in a more modern way, and to look to the future with confidence. Now the InterCity sector had become so confident that it saw that very same corporate image as a reminder of the past, something it wanted to leave behind along with its associations of drabness and indifferent customer service, not to mention the shocking industrial relations problems and strikes from which British Rail suffered periodically during the rail blue era. These had been particularly bad just before the introduction of the InterCity 125s, when the prototype version of the InterCity 125 and the experimental APT had both been "blacked" by the railway unions who insisted there should be space in the driving cabs for two drivers; one to drive and the other to, er, make the tea, I suppose. Unfortunately, strikes on various issues continued to plague British Rail subsequently, to a greater or lesser extent, but the introduction of a new InterCity corporate identity looked like a chance for a new start. The APT might have proved a failure as a package of technologies, but its new colours spread to the rest of British Rail’s Intercity train fleet from 1983 after a business relaunch.